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An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC375 Hudson StreetNew York, New York 10014Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. DavidsonPenguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices,promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorizededition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning,or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writersand allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.Hardcover edition ISBN 9780399184383Ebook edition ISBN 9780399184406Version_1CONTENTSTITLE PAGECOPYRIGHT1. The Deep Path and the Wide2. Ancient Clues3. The After Is the Before for the Next During4. The Best We Had5. A Mind Undisturbed6. Primed for Love7. Attention!8. Lightness of Being9. Mind, Body, and Genome10. Meditation as Psychotherapy11. A Yogi’s Brain12. Hidden Treasure13. Altering Traits14. A Healthy MindFURTHER RESOURCESACKNOWLEDGMENTSNOTESINDEXABOUT THE AUTHORSO1The Deep Path and the Widene bright fall morning, Steve Z, a lieutenant colonel workingin the Pentagon, heard a “crazy, loud noise,” and instantlywas covered in debris as the ceiling caved in, knocking him to thefloor, unconscious. It was September 11, 2001, and a passenger jethad smashed into the huge building, very near to Steve’s office.The debris that buried Steve saved his life as the plane’sfuselage exploded, a fireball of flames scouring the open office.Despite a concussion, Steve returned to work four days later,laboring through feverish nights, 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., becausethose were daytime hours in Afghanistan. Soon after, hevolunteered for a year in Iraq.“I mainly went to Iraq because I couldn’t walk around the Mallwithout being hypervigilant, wary of how people looked at me,totally on guard,” Steve recalls. “I couldn’t get on an elevator, I felttrapped in my car in traffic.”His symptoms were classic post-traumatic stress disorder.Then came the day he realized he couldn’t handle this on his own.Steve ended up with a psychotherapist he still sees. She led him,very gently, to try mindfulness.Mindfulness, he recalls, “gave me something I could do to helpfeel more calm, less stressed, not be so reactive.” As he practicedmore, added loving-kindness to the mix, and went on retreats, hisPTSD symptoms gradually became less frequent, less intense.Although his irritability and restlessness still came, he could seethem coming.Tales like Steve’s offer encouraging news about meditation.We have been meditators all our adult lives, and, like Steve, knowfor ourselves that the practice has countless benefits.But our scientific backgrounds give us pause, too. Noteverything chalked up to meditation’s magic actually stands up torigorous tests. And so we have set out to make clear what worksand what does not.Some of what you know about meditation may be wrong. Butwhat is true about meditation you may not know.Take Steve’s story. The tale has been repeated in endlessvariations by countless others who claim to have found relief inmeditation methods like mindfulness—not just from PTSD butfrom virtually the entire range of emotional disorders.Yet mindfulness, part of an ancient meditation tradition, wasnot intended to be such a cure; this method was only recentlyadapted as a balm for our modern forms of angst. The originalaim, embraced in some circles to this day, focuses on a deepexploration of the mind toward a profound alteration of our verybeing.On the other hand, the pragmatic applications of meditation—like the mindfulness that helped Steve recover from trauma—appeal widely but do not go so deep. Because this wide approachhas easy access, multitudes have found a way to include at least abit of meditation in their day.There are, then, two paths: the deep and the wide. Those twopaths are often confused with each other, though they differgreatly.We see the deep path embodied at two levels: in a pure form,for example, in the ancient lineages of Theravada Buddhism aspracticed in Southeast Asia, or among Tibetan yogis (for whomwe’ll see some remarkable data in chapter eleven, “A Yogi’sBrain”). We’ll call this most intensive type of practice Level 1.At Level 2, these traditions have been removed from being partof a total lifestyle—monk or yogi, for example—and adapted intoforms more palatable for the West. At Level 2, meditation comesin forms that leave behind parts of the original Asian source thatmight not make the cross-cultural journey so easily.Then there are the wide approaches. At Level 3, a furtherremove takes these same meditation practices out of their spiritualcontext and distributes them ever more widely—as is the case withmindfulness-based stress reduction (better known as MBSR),founded by our good friend Jon Kabat-Zinn and taught now inthousands of clinics and medical centers, and far beyond. OrTranscendental Meditation (TM), which offers classic Sanskritmantras to the modern world in a user-friendly format.The even more widely accessible forms of meditation at Level4 are, of necessity, the most watered-down, all the better to renderthem handy for the largest number of people. The current voguesof mindfulness-at-your-desk, or via minutes-long meditationapps, exemplify this level.We foresee also a Level 5, one that exists now only in bits andpieces, but which may well increase in number and reach withtime. At Level 5, the lessons scientists have learned in studying allthe other levels will lead to innovations and adaptations that canbe of widest benefit—a potential we explore in the final chapter, “AHealthy Mind.”The deep transformations of Level 1 fascinated us when weoriginally encountered meditation. Dan studied ancient texts andpracticed the methods they describe, particularly during the twoyears he lived in India and Sri Lanka in his grad school days andjust afterward. Richie (as everyone calls him) followed Dan to Asiafor a lengthy visit, likewise practicing on retreat there, meetingwith meditation scholars—and more recently has scanned thebrains of Olympic-level meditators in his lab at the University ofWisconsin.Our own meditation practice has been mainly at Level 2. Butfrom the start, the wide path, Levels 3 and 4, has also beenimportant to us. Our Asian teachers said if any aspect ofmeditation could help alleviate suffering, it should be offered toall, not just those on a spiritual search. Our doctoral dissertationsapplied that advice by studying ways meditation could havecognitive and emotional payoffs.The story we tell here mirrors our own personal andprofessional journey. We have been close friends andcollaborators on the science of meditation since the 1970s, whenwe met at Harvard during graduate school, and we have both beenpractitioners of this inner art over all these years (although we arenowhere near mastery).While we were both trained as psychologists, we bringcomplementary skills to telling this story. Dan is a seasonedscience journalist who wrote for the New York Times for morethan a decade. Richie, a neuroscientist, founded and heads theUniversity of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds, in addition todirecting the brain imaging laboratory at the Waisman Centerthere, replete with its own fMRI, PET scanner, and a battery ofcutting-edge data analysis programs, along with hundreds ofservers for the heavy-duty computing required for this work. Hisresearch group numbers more than a hundred experts, who rangefrom physicists, statisticians, and computer scientists toneuroscientists and psychologists, as well as scholars of meditativetraditions.Coauthoring a book can be awkward. We’ve had some of that,to be sure—but whatever drawbacks coauthorship brought us hasworked on what would become a journalarticle piecing together the little relevant data we could find tosupport our first statement of extremely positive altered traits.We called it “The Role of Attention in Meditation andHypnosis: A Psychobiological Perspective on Transformations ofConsciousness.” The operative phrase here is transformations ofconsciousness, our term then for altered traits, which we saw as a“psychobiological” (today we’d say “neural”) shift. We contendedthat hypnosis, unlike meditation, produced primarily state effects,and not trait effects as with meditation.In those times the fascination was not with traits but ratheraltered states, whether from psychedelics or meditation. But, aswe put it in talking at Bailey’s, “after the high goes, you’re still thesame schmuck you were before.” We articulated the idea moreformally in the subsequent journal article.We were speaking to a basic confusion, still too common,about how meditation can change us. Some people fixate on theremarkable states attained during a meditation session—particularly during long retreats—and give little notice to how, oreven if, those states translate into a lasting change for the better intheir qualities of being after they’ve gone home. Valuing just theheights misses the true point of practice: to transform ourselves inlasting ways day to day.More recently, this point was driven home to us when we hadthe chance to tell the Dalai Lama about the meditative states andtheir brain patterns that a longtime practitioner displayed inRichie’s lab. As this expert engaged in specific kinds of meditation—for instance, concentration or visualization—the brain imagingdata revealed a distinct neural profile for each meditative alteredstate.“It’s very good,” the Dalai Lama commented, “he managed toshow some signs of yogic ability”—by which he meant theintensive meditation over months or years practiced by yogis inHimalayan caves, as opposed to the garden variety of yoga forfitness so popular these days.5But then he added, “The true mark of a meditator is that hehas disciplined his mind by freeing it from negative emotions.”That rule of thumb has stayed constant since before the timeof the Visuddhimagga: It’s not the highs along the way thatmatter. It’s who you become.Puzzling over how to reconcile the meditation map with whatwe had experienced ourselves, and then with the admittedly scantscientific evidence, we articulated a hypothesis: The after is thebefore for the next during.To unpack this idea, after refers to enduring changes frommeditation that last long beyond the practice session itself. Beforemeans the condition we are in at baseline, before we startmeditating. During is what happens as we meditate, temporarychanges in our state that pass when we stop meditating.In other words, repeated practice of meditation results inlasting traits—the after.We were intrigued by the possibility of some biologicalpathway where repeated practice led to a steady embodiment ofhighly positive traits like kindness, patience, presence, and easeunder any circumstances. Meditation, we argued, was a tool tofoster precisely such beneficial fixtures of being.We published our article in one of maybe two or threeacademic publications interested in such exotic topics asmeditation back in the 1970s.6 This was a first glimmer of ourthinking on altered traits, albeit with a flimsy science base. Themaxim “probability is not proof” applied, in a sense: what we hadwas a possibility, but little to pin a probability on, and zero proof.When we first wrote about this, no scientific study had beenconducted that would provide the kind of evidence we needed.Only long decades after we published the article would Richie findthat for highly adept meditators, their “before” state was, indeed,very different from that of people who had never meditated, ordone very little meditating—it was an indicator of an altered trait(as we’ll see in chapter twelve, “Hidden Treasure”).No one in psychology in those days had talked about alteredtraits. Plus, our raw material was highly unusual forpsychologists: ancient meditation manuals, then hard to come byoutside Asia, along with our own experiences in intensivemeditation retreats, and chance meetings with highly adeptpractitioners. We were, to say the least, outliers in psychology—oroddballs, as we no doubt were perceived by some of our Harvardcolleagues.Our vision of altered traits made a leap far beyond thepsychological science of our day. Risky business.THE SCIENCE CATCHES UPWhen an imaginative researcher concocts a novel idea, it starts achain of events much like natural variation in evolution: as soundempirical tests weigh new ideas, they eliminate bad hypothesesand spread good ones.7For this to happen, science needs to balance skeptics withspeculators—people who cast wide nets, think imaginatively, andconsider “what if.” The web of knowledge grows by testing originalideas brought to it by speculators like ourselves. If only skepticspursued science, little innovation would occur.Economist Joseph Schumpeter has become known these daysfor the concept of “creative destruction,” where the new disruptsthe old in a market. Our early hunches about altered traits fit whatSchumpeter called “vision”: an intuitive act that supplies directionand energy for analytic efforts. A vision lets you see things in anew light, as he says, one “not to be found in the facts, methods,and results of the preexisting state of the science.”8Sure, we had a vision in this sense—but we had paltry methodsor data available for exploring this positive range of altered traits,and no idea of the brain mechanism that would allow such aprofound shift. We were determined to make the argument, butwere years too soon for the crucial scientific piece in this puzzle.Our dissertation data were feebly—very feebly—supportive ofthe idea that the more you practice how to generate a meditativestate, the more that practice shows lasting influences beyond thesession itself.Still, as brain science has evolved over the decades, we sawmounting rationales for our ideas.Richie attended his first meeting of the Society forNeuroscience in 1975 in New York City, along with about 2,500other scientists, all exhilarated that they were seeing the birth of anew field (and none dreaming that these days those meetingswould draw more than 30,000 neuroscientists).9 In the mid-1980s one of the early presidents of the society, Bruce McEwen ofRockefeller University, gave us scientific ammunition.McEwen put a dominant tree shrew in the same cage fortwenty-eight days with one lower in the pecking order—the rodentversion of being trapped at work with a nightmare boss 24/7 for amonth. The big shock from McEwen’s study was that in the brainof the dominated rodent, dendrites shrank in the hippocampus, anode crucial for memory. These branching projections of thebody’s cells allow them to reach out to and act on other cells;shrinking dendrites mean faulty memory.McEwen’s results ripped through the brain and behavioralsciences like a small tsunami, opening minds to the possibility thata given experience could leave an imprint on the brain. McEwenwas zeroing in on a holy grail for psychology: how stressful eventsproduce lingering neural scars. That an experience of any kindcould leave its mark on the brain had, until then, beenunthinkable.To be sure, stress was par for the course for a laboratory rat—McEwen just upped the intensity. The standard setup for lab ratliving quarters was the rodent equivalent of solitary confinement:weeks or months on end in a small wire cage and, if the rat waslucky, a running wheel for exercise.Contrast that life in perpetual boredom and social isolation tosomething like a rodent health resort,with lots of toys, things toclimb on, colorful walls, playmates, and interesting spaces toexplore. That’s the stimulating habitat Marion Diamond at theUniversity of California at Berkeley built for her lab rats. Workingabout the same time as McEwen, Diamond found the rats’ brainsbenefited, with thicker dendritic branches connecting neurons andgrowth in brain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, that arecrucial in attention and self-regulation.10While McEwen’s work showed how adverse events can shrinkparts of the brain, Diamond’s emphasized the positive in herstudies. Yet her work was largely met with a shrug inneuroscience, perhaps because it posed a direct challenge topervasive beliefs in the field. The conventional wisdom then wasthat at birth we host in our skull a maximum number of neurons,and then inexorably lose them in a steady die-off over the courseof life. Experience, supposedly, had nothing to do with this.But McEwen and Diamond led us to wonder, If these brainchanges for worse and for better could occur with rats, might theright experience change the human brain toward beneficial alteredtraits? Could meditation be just such a helpful inner workout?The glimpse of this possibility was exhilarating. We sensedsomething truly revolutionary was in the offing, but it took acouple more decades before the evidence began to catch up withour hunch.THE BIG LEAPThe year was 1992, and Richie was nervous when the sociologydepartment at the University of Wisconsin asked him to deliver amajor departmental colloquium. He knew he was walking into thecenter of an intellectual cyclone, a battle over “nature” and“nurture” that had raged for years in the social sciences. Thenurture camp believed that our behavior was shaped by ourexperiences; the “nature” camp saw our genes as determining ourbehavior.The battle had a long, ugly history—racists in the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries twisted the genetics of their day as“scientific” grounds for bias against blacks, Native Americans,Jews, the Irish, and a long list of other targets of bigotry. Theracists attributed any and all lags in educational and economicattainments of the target group to their genetic destiny, ignoringvast imbalances in opportunity. The resulting backlash in thesocial sciences had made many in that sociology departmentdeeply skeptical of any biological explanation.But Richie felt that sociologists committed a scientific fallacyin immediately assuming that biological causes necessarilyreduced group differences to genetics—and so were seen asunchangeable. In Richie’s view, these sociologists were carriedaway by an ideological stance.For the first time in public he proposed the concept of“neuroplasticity” as a way to resolve this battle between natureand nurture. Neuroplasticity, he explained, shows that repeatedexperience can change the brain, shaping it. We don’t have tochoose between nature or nurture. They interact, each moldingthe other.The concept neatly reconciled what had been hostile points ofview. But Richie was reaching beyond the science of the day; thedata on human neuroplasticity were still hazy.That changed just a few years later with a cascade of scientificfindings—for instance, those showing that mastering a musicalinstrument enlarged the relevant brain centers.11 Violinists, whoseleft hands continuously fingered the strings while they played, hadenlarged areas of the brain that manage that finger work. Thelonger they had played, the greater the size.12NATURE’S EXPERIMENTTry this. Look straight ahead and hold up a finger with your armoutstretched. Still looking straight ahead, slowly shift that fingeruntil it is about two feet to the right of your nose. When you moveyour finger far to the right, but stay focused straight ahead, itlands in your peripheral vision, the outer edge of what your visualsystem takes in.13Most people lose sight of their finger as it moves to the farright or left of their nose. But one group does not: people who aredeaf.While this unusual visual advantage in the deaf has long beenknown, the brain basis has only recently been shown. And themechanism is, again, neuroplasticity.Brain studies like this take advantage of so-called“experiments of nature,” naturally occurring situations such ascongenital deafness. Helen Neville, a neuroscientist at theUniversity of Oregon with a passionate interest in brain plasticity,seized the opportunity to use an MRI brain scanner to test bothdeaf and hearing people with a visual simulation that mimickedwhat a deaf person sees when reading sign language.Signs are expansive gestures. When a deaf person is readingthe signing of another, she typically looks at the face of the personwho is signing—not directly at how the hands move as they sign.Some of those expansive gestures move in the periphery of thevisual field, and thus naturally exercise the brain’s ability toperceive within this outer rim of vision. Plasticity lets thesecircuits take on a visual task as the deaf person learns signlanguage: reading what’s going on at the very edge of vision.The chunk of neural real estate that usually operates as theprimary auditory cortex (known as Heschl’s gyrus) receives nosensory inputs in deaf people. The brains of deaf people, Nevillediscovered, had morphed so that what is ordinarily a part of theauditory system was now working with the visual circuitry.14Such findings illustrate how radically the brain can rewireitself in response to repeated experiences.15 The findings inmusicians and in the deaf—and a slew of others—offered a proofwe had been waiting for. Neuroplasticity provides an evidence-based framework and a language that makes sense in terms ofcurrent scientific thinking.16 It was the scientific platform we hadlong needed, a way of thinking about how intentional training ofthe mind, like meditation, might shape the brain.THE ALTERED TRAIT SPECTRUMAltered traits map along a spectrum starting at the negative end,with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a case in point. Theamygdala acts as the neural radar for threat. Overwhelmingtrauma resets to a hair trigger the amygdala’s threshold forhijacking the rest of the brain to respond to what it perceives as anemergency.17 In people with PTSD, any cue that reminds them ofthe traumatic experience—and that for someone else would not beparticularly noticeable—sets off a cascade of neural overreactionsthat create the flashbacks, sleeplessness, irritability, andhypervigilant anxiety of that disorder.Moving along the trait spectrum toward the positive range,there are the beneficial neural impacts of being a secure child,whose brain gets molded by empathic, concerned, and nurturingparenting. This childhood brain shaping builds in adulthood, forexample, into being able to calm down well when upset.18Our interest in altered traits looks beyond the merely healthyspectrum to an even more beneficial range, wholesome traits ofbeing. These extremely positive altered traits, like equanimity andcompassion, are a goal of mind training in contemplativetraditions. We use the term altered trait as shorthand for thishighly positive range.19Neuroplasticity offers a scientific basis for how repeatedtraining could create those lasting qualities of being we hadencountered in a handful of exceptional yogis, swamis, monks,and lamas. Their altered traits fit ancient descriptions of lastingtransformation at the higher levels.A mind free from disturbance has value in lessening humansuffering, a goal shared by science and meditative paths alike. Butapart from lofty heights of being, there’s a more practical potentialwithin reach of every one of us: a life best described as flourishing.FLOURISHINGAs Alexander the Great was leading his armies through whatisnow Kashmir, legend has it he met a group of ascetic yogis inTaxila, then a thriving city on a branch of the Silk Road leading tothe plains of India.The yogis responded to the appearance of Alexander’s fiercesoldiers with indifference, saying that he, like them, could actuallypossess only the ground on which he stood—and that he, likethem, would die one day.The Greek-derived word for these yogis is gymnosophists,literally “naked philosophers” (even today some groups of Indianyogis roam naked, coating themselves in ashes). Alexander,impressed by their equanimity, deemed them to be “free men,”and even convinced one yogi, Kalyana, to accompany him on hisjourney of conquest. No doubt the yogi’s lifestyle and outlookresonated with Alexander’s own schooling. Alexander had beentutored by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Renowned for hislifelong love of learning, Alexander would have recognized theyogis as exemplars of another source of wisdom.The Greek schools of philosophy espoused an ideal of personaltransformation that remarkably echoes those of Asia, as Alexandermay have found in his exchanges with Kalyana. The Greeks andtheir heirs the Romans, of course, laid the foundation for Westernthought down to the present day.Aristotle posited the goal of life as a virtue-based eudaimonia—a quality of flourishing—a view that continues under manyguises in modern thought. Virtues, Aristotle said, are attained inpart by finding the “right mean” between extremes; courage liesbetween impulsive risk-taking and cowardice, a temperedmoderation between self-indulgence and ascetic denial.And, he added, we are not by nature virtuous but all have thepotential to become so through the right effort. That effortincludes what today we would call self-monitoring, the ongoingpractice of noting our thoughts and acts.Other Greco-Roman philosophic schools used similar practicesin their own paths toward flourishing. For the Stoics, one key wasseeing that our feelings about life’s events, not those eventsthemselves, determine our happiness; we find equanimity bydistinguishing what we can control in life from what we cannot.Today that creed finds an echo in the popularized Twelve Stepversion of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer:God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannotchange,Courage to change the things I can,And wisdom to know the difference.The classical way to the “wisdom to know the difference” lay inmental training. These Greek schools saw philosophy as anapplied art and taught contemplative exercises and self-disciplineas paths to flourishing. Like their peers to the East, the Greeks sawthat we can cultivate qualities of mind that foster well-being.The Greek practices for developing virtues were to some extenttaught openly, while others were apparently given only to initiateslike Alexander, who noted that the philosopher’s texts were morefully understood in the context of these secretive teachings.In the Greco-Roman tradition, qualities such as integrity,kindness, patience, and humility were considered keys to enduringwell-being. These Western thinkers and Asian spiritual traditionsalike saw the value in cultivating a virtuous life via a roughlysimilar transformation of being. In Buddhism, for example, theideal of inner flourishing gets put in terms of bodhi (in Pali andSanskrit), a path of self-actualization that nourishes “the very bestwithin oneself.”20ARISTOTLE’S DESCENDANTSToday’s psychology uses the term well-being for a version of theAristotelian meme flourishing. University of Wisconsinpsychologist (and Richie’s colleague there) Carol Ryff, drawing onAristotle among many other thinkers, posits a model of well-beingwith six arms:Self-acceptance, being positive about yourself,acknowledging both your best and not-so-good qualities,and feeling fine about being just as you are. This takes anonjudgmental self-awareness.Personal growth, the sense you continue to change anddevelop toward your full potential—getting better astime goes on—adopting new ways of seeing or being andmaking the most of your talents. “Each of you is perfectthe way you are,” Zen master Suzuki Roshi told hisstudents, adding, “and you can use a littleimprovement”—neatly reconciling acceptance withgrowth.Autonomy, independence in thought and deed, freedomfrom social pressure, and using your own standards tomeasure yourself. This, by the way, applies moststrongly in individualistic cultures like Australia and theUnited States, as compared with cultures like Japan,where harmony with one’s group looms larger.Mastery, feeling competent to handle life’s complexities,seizing opportunities as they come your way, andcreating situations that suit your needs and values.Satisfying relationships, with warmth, empathy, andtrust, along with mutual concern for each other and ahealthy give-and-take.Life purpose, goals and beliefs that give you a sense ofmeaning and direction. Some philosophers argue thattrue happiness comes as a by-product of meaning andpurpose in life.Ryff sees these qualities as a modern version of eudaimonia—Aristotle’s “highest of all human good,” the realization of yourunique potential.21 As we will see in the chapters that follow,different varieties of meditation seem to cultivate one or more ofthese capacities. More immediately, several studies have looked athow meditation boosted people’s ratings on Ryff’s own measure ofwell-being.Fewer than half of Americans, according to the Centers forDisease Control and Prevention, report feeling a strong sense ofpurpose in life beyond their jobs and family obligations.22 Thatparticular aspect of well-being may have significant implications:Viktor Frankl has written about how a sense of meaning andpurpose allowed him and select others to survive years in a Naziconcentration camp while thousands were dying around them.23For Frankl, continuing his work as a psychotherapist with otherprisoners in the camp lent purpose to his life; for another manthere, it was having a child who was on the outside; yet anotherfound purpose in the book he wanted to write.Frankl’s sentiment resonates with a finding that after a three-month meditation retreat (about 540 hours total), thosepractitioners who had strengthened a sense of purpose in lifeduring that time also showed a simultaneous increase in theactivity of telomerase in their immune cells, even five monthslater.24 This enzyme protects the length of telomeres, the caps atthe ends of DNA strands that reflect how long a cell will live.It’s as though the body’s cells were saying, stick around—you’ve got important work to do. On the other hand, as theseresearchers note, this finding needs to be replicated in well-designed studies before we can be more sure.Also of interest: eight weeks of a variety of mindfulnessseemed to enlarge a region in the brain stem that correlated with aboost in well-being on Ryff’s test.25 But the study was quite small—just fourteen people—and so, needs to be redone with a largergroup before we can draw more than tentative conclusions.Similarly, in a separate study, people practicing a popular formof mindfulness reported higher levels of well-being and other suchbenefits up to a year later.26 The more everyday mindfulness, thegreater the subjective boost in well-being. Again, the numbers inthis study were small, and a brain measure—which, as we’ve said,is far less susceptible to psychological skew than self-evaluations—would be even more convincing.So, while we find the conclusion that meditation enhanceswell-being an appealing idea, especially as meditators ourselves,our science side remains skeptical.Studies such as these are often cited as “proving” the merits ofmeditation, particularly these days, when mindfulness has becomethe flavor du jour. But meditation research varies enormouslywhen it comes to scientific soundness—though when used topromote some brand of meditation, app, or other contemplative“product,” this inconvenient truth goes missing.In the chapters that follow, we’ve used rigorous standards tosort out fluff from fact. What does science actually tell us about theimpacts of meditation?T4The Best We Hadhe scene: a woodworking shop, and two fellows—we’ll callthem Al and Frank—are happily chatting away while Al feedsa huge sheet of plywood into the jagged blades of a giant circularsaw. Suddenly you notice that Al has not used the safety guard forthat saw blade—and your heartbeat speeds up as you see histhumb is headed toward that nasty sharp-toothed circle of steel.Al and Frank are lost in their chatting, both oblivious to thedanger at hand, even as that thumb heads closer to the whirringblade. Your heart races and beads of sweat form on your brow.You have the urgent wish to warn Al—but he’s an actor in the filmyou’re watching.It Didn’t Have to Happen, made by the Canadian Film Boardto scare woodworkers into using their machine’s safety devices,depicts three shop accidents in its twelve short minutes. Like thatthumb heading inexorably into the blade, each of them builds insuspense until the moment of impact: Al loses his thumb to thecircular saw; another worker has his fingers lacerated, and awooden plank flies into the midsection of a bystander.The film had a life quite apart from its intended warning towoodworkers. Richard Lazarus, a psychologist at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, deployed those depictions of gruesomeaccidents as a reliable emotional stressor in more than a decade ofhis landmark research.1 He generously gave Dan a copy of the filmto use in the research at Harvard.Dan showed the film to some sixty people, half of themvolunteers (Harvard students taking psychology courses) who hadno meditation experience, the other half meditation teachers withat least two years of practice. Half the people in each groupmeditated just before watching the film; he taught the Harvardnovices to meditate there in the lab. Dan told those assigned to acontrol group picked at random to simply sit and relax.As their heart rate and sweat response jumped and subsidedwith the shop accidents, Dan sat in the control room next door.Experienced meditators tended to recover from the stress ofseeing those upsetting events more quickly than people who werenew to the practice.2 Or so it seemed.This research was sound enough to earn Dan a Harvard PhDand to be published in one of the top journals in his field. Even so,looking back with closer scrutiny, we see a plethora of issues andproblems. Those who review grants and journal articles have strictstandards for what research designs are best—that is, have themost trustworthy results. From that viewpoint, Dan’s research—and the majority of studies of meditation even today—has flaws.For instance, Dan was the person who taught the volunteers tomeditate or told them to just relax. But Dan knew the desiredoutcome, that meditation should help more—and that could wellhave influenced how he spoke to the two groups, perhaps in a waythat encouraged good results from meditation and poor ones fromthe control condition who just relaxed.Another point: of the 313 journal articles that cited Dan’sfindings, not one attempted to redo the study to see if they wouldget similar outcomes. These authors just assumed that the resultswere sturdy enough to use as grounds for their own conclusions.Dan’s study is not alone; that attitude prevails still today.Replicability, as it’s known in the trade, stands as a strength of thescientific method; any other scientist should be able to reproducea given experiment and yield the same findings—or reveal thefailure to reproduce them. But very, very few ever even try.This lack of replication looms as a pervasive problem inscience, particularly when it comes to studies of human behavior.While psychologists have made proposals for makingpsychological studies more replicable, at present little is knownabout how many of even the most commonly cited studies wouldhold up, though possibly most would.3 And only a tiny fraction ofstudies in psychology are ever targets of replication; the field’sincentives favor original work, not duplication. Plus, psychology,like all sciences, has a strong inbuilt publication bias: scientistsrarely try to publish studies when they get no significant results.And yet that null finding itself has significance.Then there’s the crucial difference between “soft” and “hard”measures. If you ask people to report on their own behaviors,feelings, and the like—soft measures—psychological factors like aperson’s mood of the moment and wanting to look good or pleasethe investigator can influence enormously how they respond. Onthe other hand, such biases are less (or not at all) likely toinfluence physiological processes like heart rate or brain activity,which makes them hard metrics.Take Dan’s research: he relied to some extent on soft measureswhere people evaluated their own reactions. He used a popular(among psychologists) anxiety assessment that had people ratethemselves on items like “I feel worried,” from “not at all” to “verymuch so,” and from “almost never” to “almost always.”4 Thismethod by and large showed them feeling less stressed after theirfirst taste of meditation—a fairly common finding over the yearssince in meditation studies. But such self-reports are notoriouslysusceptible to “expectation demand,” the implicit signals to reporta positive outcome.Even beginners in meditation report they feel more relaxedand less stressed once they start. Such self-reports of better stressmanagement show up much earlier in meditators’ data than dohard measures like brain activity. This could mean that the senseof lessened anxiety that meditators experience occurs beforediscernible shifts in the hard measures—or that the expectation ofsuch effects biases what meditators report.But the heart doesn’t lie. Dan’s study deployed physiologicalmeasures like heart rate and sweat response, which typically can’tbe intentionally controlled, and so yield a more accurate portraitof a person’s true reactions—especially compared to those highlysubjective, more easily biased self-report measures.For his dissertation Dan’s main physiological measure was thegalvanic skin response, or GSR, bursts of electrical activity thatsignify a dollop of sweat. The GSR signals the body’s stressarousal. As some speculation has it, in early evolution sweatrelease might have made the skin less brittle, protecting humansduring hand-to-hand combat.5Brain measures are even more trustworthy than “peripheral”physiological ones like heart rate. But we were too early for suchmethods, the least biased and most convincing of all. In the 1970s,brain imaging systems like the fMRI, SPECT, and fine-grainedcomputerized analysis of EEG had not yet been invented.6Measures of responses distant in the body from the brain—heartand breath rates, sweat—were the best Dan had.7 Because thosephysiological responses reflect a complex mix of forces, they are abit messy to interpret.8Another weakness of the study stems from the recordingtechnology of the day, long before such data were digitized. Sweatrates were tracked by the sweep of a needle on a continuous spoolof paper. The resulting scrawl was what Dan pored over for hours,converting ink blips into numbers for data analysis. This meantcounting the smirches that signified a spurt of sweat before andafter each shop accident.The key question: Was there a meaningful difference betweenthe four conditions—expert versus novice, told to meditate or justsit quietly—in theirspeed of recovery from the heights of arousalduring the accidents? The results, as recorded by Dan, suggestedthat meditating sped up the recovery rate, and that seasonedmeditators recovered quickest.9That phrase as recorded by Dan speaks to another potentialproblem: it was Dan who did the scoring, and the whole endeavorwas meant to support a hypothesis he endorsed. This situationfavors experimenter bias, where the person designing a study andanalyzing its data might skew the results toward a desiredoutcome.Dan’s dim (okay, very dim) recollection after nearly fifty yearsis that among the meditators, when there was an ambiguous GSR—one that might have been at the peak of reaction to the accident,or just afterward—he scored it as at the peak rather than at thebeginning of the recovery slope. The net effect of such a bias wouldbe to make meditators’ sweat response seem to react more to theaccident, while recovering more quickly (however, as we shall see,this is precisely the pattern found in the most advancedmeditators studied so far).Research on bias has found two levels: our consciouspredilections and, harder to counter, our unconscious ones. Tothis day Dan cannot swear that his scoring of those inkspots wasunbiased. Along those lines, Dan shared the dilemma of mostscientists who do research on meditation: they are themselvesmeditators, which can encourage such bias, even if unconscious.UNBIASING SCIENCEIt could have been a scene straight out of a Bollywood version ofthe Godfather movies: a black Cadillac limo pulled up at anassigned time and place, the back door opened, and Dan got in.Seated next to him was the big boss—not Marlon Brando/DonCorleone, but rather a smallish, bearded yogi clad in a white dhoti.Yogi Z had come from the East to America in the 1960s andquickly captured headlines by mingling with celebrities. Heattracted a huge following, and recruited hundreds of youngAmericans to become teachers of his method. In 1971, just beforehis first trip to India, Dan attended a teacher training summercamp the yogi ran.Yogi Z somehow heard that Dan was a Harvard grad studentabout to travel to India on a predoctoral fellowship. The yogi had aplan for this predoc. Handing Dan a list of names and addresses ofhis own followers in India, Yogi Z instructed him to look each oneup, interview them, and then write a doctoral dissertation with thethesis and conclusion that this particular yogi’s method was theonly way to become “enlightened” in this day and age.For Dan the idea was abhorrent. Such outright hijacking ofresearch to promote a particular brand of meditation typifies thehustle that, regrettably, has characterized a certain kind of“spiritual teacher” (remember Swami X). When such a teacherengages in the self-promotion typical of some commercial brand,it signals that someone hopes to use the appearance of innerprogress in the service of marketing. And when researchers wed toa particular brand of meditation report positive findings, the samequestionable bias arises, as well as another question: Were therenegative results that went unreported?For instance, the meditation teachers in Dan’s study taughtTranscendental Meditation (TM). TM research has had asomewhat checkered history in part because most of it has beendone by staff at Maharishi University of Management (formerlyMaharishi International University), which is a part of theorganization that promotes TM. This raises the concern of aconflict of interest, even when the research has been well done.For this reason, Richie’s lab intentionally employs severalscientists who are skeptical of meditation’s effects, and who raise ahealthy number of issues and questions that “true believers” in thepractice might overlook or sweep under the rug. One result:Richie’s lab has published several nonfindings, studies that test aspecific hypothesis about the effect of meditation and fail toobserve the expected effect. The lab also publishes failures toreplicate—studies that do not get the same results whenduplicating the method of previously published papers that foundmeditation has some beneficial effect. Such failures to replicateearlier findings call them into question.Bringing in skeptics is but one of many ways to minimizeexperimenter bias. Another would be to study a group that is toldabout meditation practices and their benefits but gets noinstruction. Better: an “active control,” where one group engagesin an activity unlike meditation, one that they believe will benefitthem, such as exercise.A further dilemma in our Harvard research, also still pervasivein psychology, was that the undergrads available for study in ourlab were not typical of humanity as a whole. Our experiments weredone with subjects known in the field as WEIRD: Western,educated, industrialized, rich, and from democratic cultures.10And using Harvard students, an outlier group even among theWEIRD, makes the data less valuable in searching for universalsin human nature.THE VARIETIES OF THE MEDITATIVEEXPERIENCERichie in his dissertation research was among the firstneuroscientists to ask if we can identify a neural signature ofattention skill. That basic question was, in those days, quiterespectable.But Richie’s PhD research was in the spirit of that concealedexcursion into the mind in his undergraduate work. The agendaembedded, sub rosa, in the study: exploring if signs of skill inattention differed in meditators and nonmeditators. Didmeditators get better at focusing? In those days, that was not arespectable question.Richie measured the brain electrical signals from the scalp ofmeditators as they heard tones or saw flashing LED lights, whilehe instructed them to focus on the sounds and ignore the lights, orvice versa. Richie analyzed the electrical signals for “event-relatedpotential” (ERP), indicated by specific blips in response to a lightand/or tone. The ERP, embedded in a chorus of noise, is a signalso minuscule it is measured in microvolts—millionths of a volt.These tiny signals offer a window on how we allocate ourattention.Richie found that the size of these tiny signals was diminishedin response to the tone when meditators focused on the light,while the signals triggered by the light were reduced in size whenthe meditators focused their attention on the tone. That findingalone would be ho-hum; we would expect that. But this pattern ofblocking out the unwanted modality was much stronger in themeditators than in the controls—some of the first evidence thatmeditators were better at focusing their attention thannonmeditators.Since selecting a target for focus and ignoring distractionsmarks a key attention skill, Richie concluded that brain electricalrecordings—the EEG—could be used for this assessment (routinetoday, but a step in scientific progress back then). Still, theevidence that meditators were any better at this than the controlgroup, who had never meditated, was rather weak.In retrospect, we can see one reason why this evidence was initself questionable: Richie had recruited a mix of meditators, whodeployed various methods. Back in 1975 we were quite naive abouthow important these variations in technique were. Today we knowthere are many aspects of attention, and that different kinds ofmeditation train a variety of mental habits, and so, impact mentalskills in varying ways.For example, researchers at the Max Planck Institute forHuman Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, hadnovices practice daily for a few months three different types ofmeditation: focusing on breathing; generating loving-kindness;and monitoring thoughts without getting swept away by them.11Breath focus, they found, was calming—seeming to confirm awidespread assumption about meditation’s usefulness as a meansto relax. Butin contradiction to that stereotype, neither the loving-kindness practice nor monitoring thoughts made the body morerelaxed, apparently because each demands mental effort: forexample, while watching thoughts you continually get swept up inthem—and then, when you notice this has happened, need tomake a conscious effort to simply watch again. In addition, theloving-kindness practice, where you wish yourself and others well,understandably created a positive mood, while the other twomethods did not.So, differing types of meditation produce unique results—afact that should make it a routine move to identify the specific typebeing studied. Yet confusion about the specifics remains all toocommon. One research group, for instance, has collected state-of-the-art data on brain anatomy in fifty meditators, an invaluabledata set.12 Except that the names of the meditation practices beingstudied reveals a mixture of types—a hodgepodge. Had the specificmental training entailed by each meditation type beenmethodically recorded, that data set might well yield even morevaluable findings. (Even so, kudos for disclosing this information,which too often goes unnoted.)As we read through the now vast trove of research onmeditation, we sometimes wince when we come across theconfusion and naiveté of some scientists about the specifics. Toooften they are simply mistaken, like the scientific article that saidthat in both Zen and Goenka-style vipassana, meditators havetheir eyes open (what’s wrong here: Goenka has people close theireyes).A handful of studies have used an “antimeditation” method asan active control. In one version of this so-called antimeditation,volunteers were told to concentrate on as many positive thoughtsas possible—which actually resembles some contemplativemethods, such as the loving-kindness meditation we will review inchapter six. The fact that those experimenters thought this wasunlike meditation speaks to their confusion about what exactlythey were researching.The rule of thumb—that what gets practiced gets improved—underscores the importance of matching a given mental strategyin meditation to its result. This is true equally for those who studymeditation and those who meditate: one must be aware of thelikely outcomes from a given meditation approach. They are notall the same, contrary to the misunderstanding among someresearchers, and even practitioners.In the realm of mind (as everywhere else), what you dodetermines what you get. In sum, “meditation” is not a singleactivity but a wide range of practices, all acting in their ownparticular ways in the mind and brain.Lost in Wonderland, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, “Which wayshould I go?”He replied, “That depends on where you want to get to.”The Cheshire Cat’s advice to Alice holds, too, for meditation.COUNTING THE HOURSEach of Dan’s “expert” meditators, all Transcendental Meditationteachers, had practiced TM for at least two years. But Dan had noway of knowing how many total hours they had put in over thoseyears. Nor did he know what the actual quality of those hoursmight have been.Few researchers, even today, have this crucial piece of data.But, as we will see in more detail in chapter thirteen, “AlteringTraits,” our model of change tracks how many lifetime hours ofpractice a meditator has done and whether it was daily or onretreat. These total hours are then connected with shifts inqualities of being and the underlying differences in the brain thatgive rise to them.Very often meditators are lumped into gross categories ofexperience, like “beginner” and “expert,” without any furtherspecifics. One research group reported the daily time the peoplethey studied put into meditation—ranging from ten minutes a fewtimes a week to 240 minutes daily—but not how many months oryears they had done so, which is essential in calculating lifetimehours of practice.Yet this calculation goes missing in the vast majority ofmeditation studies. So that classic Zen study from the 1960sshowing a failure to habituate to repeated sounds—one of the fewexisting then and one that had gotten us interested in the firstplace—actually gave sparse data on the Zen monks’ meditationexperience. Was it an hour a day, ten minutes, zero on some days,or six hours every day? How many retreats (sesshins) of moreintensive practice did they do, and how many hours of meditationdid each involve? We have no idea.To this day the list of studies that suffer from this uncertaintycould go on and on. But getting detailed information about thetotal lifetime hours of a meditator’s practice has become standardoperating procedure in Richie’s lab. Each of the meditators theystudy report on what kind of meditation practice they do, howoften and for how long they do it in a given week, and whetherthey go on retreats.If so, they note how many hours a day they practice on retreat,how long the retreat is, and how many such retreats they havedone. Even further, the meditators carefully review each retreatand estimate the time spent doing different styles of meditationpractice. This math allows the Davidson group to analyze theirdata in terms of total hours of practice and separate the time fordifferent styles and for retreat versus home hours.As we will see, there sometimes is a dose-response relationshipwhen it comes to the brain and behavioral benefits frommeditation: the more you do it, the better the payoff. That meansthat when researchers fail to report the lifetime hours of themeditators they are studying, something important has gonemissing. By the same token, too many meditation studies thatinclude an “expert” group show wild variation in what that termmeans—and don’t use a precise metric for how many hours those“experts” have practiced.If the people being studied are meditating for the first time—say, being trained in mindfulness—their number of practice hoursis straightforward (the instruction hours plus however many theydo at home on their own). Yet many of the more interestingstudies look at seasoned meditators without calculating eachperson’s lifetime hours, which can vary greatly. One, for example,lumped together meditators who had from one year of experienceto twenty-nine years!Then there’s the matter of expertise among those givingmeditation instruction. A handful of studies among the many welooked at thought to mention how many years of experience inmeditation the teachers had, though none calculated their lifetimehours. In one study the upper number was about fifteen years; thelowest was zero.BEYOND THE HAWTHORNE EFFECTWay back in the 1920s, at the Hawthorne Works, a factory forelectrical equipment near Chicago, experimenters simplyimproved lighting in that factory and slightly adjusted workschedules. But, with even those small changes for the better,people worked harder—at least for a while.The take-home: any positive intervention (and, perhaps,simply having someone observe your behavior) will move peopleto say they feel better or improve in some other way. Such“Hawthorne effects,” though, do not mean there was any uniquevalue-added factor from a given intervention; the same upwardbump would occur from any change people regarded as positive.Richie’s lab, sensitized to issues like the Hawthorne effect, hasdevoted considerable thought and effort to using propercomparison conditions in their studies of meditation. Theinstructor’s enthusiasm for a given method can infect those wholearn it—and so the “control” method should be taught with thesame level of positivity as is true for the meditation.To tease out extraneous effects like these from the actualimpacts of meditation, Richie and his colleagues developed aHealth Enhancement Program (HEP) as a comparison conditionfor studies of mindfulness-based stress reduction.HEP consists ofmusic therapy with relaxation; nutritional education; andmovement exercises like posture improvement, balance, corestrengthening, stretching, and walking or jogging.In the labs’ studies, the instructors who taught HEP believed itwould help, just as much as did those who taught meditation.Such an “active control” can neutralize factors like enthusiasm,and so better identify the unique benefits of any intervention—inthis case, meditation—to see what it adds over and above theHawthorne edge.Richie’s group randomly assigned volunteers to either HEP ormindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and then before andafter the training had them fill out questionnaires that in earlierresearch had reflected improvements from meditation. But in thisstudy, both groups reported comparable improvement on thesesubjective measures of general distress, anxiety, and medicalsymptoms. This led Richie’s group to conclude that much of thestress relief improvements beginners credit to meditation do notseem to be that unique.13Moreover, on a questionnaire that was specifically developedto measure mindfulness, absolutely no difference was found in thelevel of improvement from MBSR or HEP.14This led Richie’s lab to conclude that for this variety ofmindfulness, and likely for any other meditation, many of thereported benefits in the early stages of practice can be chalked upto expectation, social bonding in the group, instructor enthusiasm,or other “demand characteristics.” Rather than being frommeditation per se, any reported benefits may simply be signs thatpeople have positive hopes and expectations.Such data are a warning to anyone looking for a meditationpractice to be wary of exaggerated claims about its benefits. Andalso a wake-up call to the scientific community to be morerigorous in designing meditation studies. Just finding that peoplepracticing one or another kind of meditation report improvementscompared to those in a control group who do nothing does notmean such benefits are due to the meditation itself. Yet this isperhaps the most common paradigm still used in research on thebenefits of meditation—and it clouds the picture of what the trueadvantages of the practice might be.We might expect similar enthusiastic reports from someonewho expects a boost in well-being by taking up Pilates, bowling, orthe Paleo Diet.WHAT EXACTLY IS “MINDFULNESS”?Then there is the confusion about what we mean by mindfulness,perhaps the most popular method du jour among researchers.Some scientists use the term as a stand-in for any and all kinds ofmeditation. And in popular usage, mindfulness can refer tomeditation in general, despite the fact that mindfulness is but oneof a wide variety of methods.To dig down a bit, mindfulness has become the most commonEnglish translation of the Pali language’s word sati. Scholars,however, translate sati in many other ways—“awareness,”“attention,” “retention,” even “discernment.”15 In short, there isnot a single English equivalent for sati on which all expertsagree.16Some meditation traditions reserve “mindfulness” for noticingwhen the mind wanders. In this sense, mindfulness becomes partof a larger sequence which starts with a focus on one thing, thenthe mind wandering off to something else, and then the mindfulmoment: noticing the mind has wandered. The sequence endswith returning attention to the point of focus.That sequence—familiar to any meditator—could also be called“concentration,” where mindfulness plays a supporting role in theeffort to focus on one thing. In one-pointed focus on a mantra, forexample, sometimes the instruction is, “Whenever you notice yourmind wandering, gently start the mantra again.” In the mechanicsof meditation, focusing on one thing only means also noticingwhen your mind wanders off so you can bring it back—and soconcentration and mindfulness go hand in hand.Another common meaning of mindfulness refers to a floatingawareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experiencewithout judging or otherwise reacting. Perhaps the most widelyquoted definition comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn: “The awarenessthat emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the presentmoment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience.”17From the viewpoint of cognitive science, there’s another twistwhen it comes to the precise methods used: what’s called“mindfulness,” by scientists and practitioners alike, can refer tovery different ways to deploy attention. For example, the waymindfulness gets defined in a Zen or Theravadan context lookslittle like the understanding of the term in some Tibetantraditions.Each refers to differing (sometimes subtly so) attentionalstances—and quite possibly to disparate brain correlates. So itbecomes essential that researchers understand what kind ofmindfulness they are actually studying—or if, indeed, a particularvariety of meditation actually is mindfulness.The meaning of the term mindfulness in scientific research hastaken a strange turn. One of the most commonly used measures ofmindfulness was not developed on the basis of what happensduring actual mindfulness meditation but rather by testinghundreds of college undergraduates on a questionnaire that theresearchers thought would capture different facets ofmindfulness.18 For example, you are asked whether statementslike these are true for you: “I watch my feelings without gettingcarried away by them” or “I find it difficult to stay focused onwhat’s happening in the present moment.”The test includes qualities like not judging yourself—forexample, when you have an inappropriate feeling. This all seemsfine at first glance. Such a measure of mindfulness should anddoes correlate with people’s progress in training programs likeMBSR, and the test scores correlated with the amount and qualityof mindfulness practice itself.19 From a technical viewpoint that’svery good—it’s called “construct validity” in the testing trade.But when Richie’s group put that measure to another technicaltest, they found problems in “discriminant validity,” the ability ofa measure not just to correlate with what it should—like MBSR—but also not to correlate when it should not. In this case, that testshould not reflect the changes among those in the HEP activecontrol group, which was intentionally designed not to enhancemindfulness in any way.But the results from the HEP folks were pretty much like thosefrom MBSR—an uptick in mindfulness as assessed on the self-report test. More formally, there was zero evidence that thismeasure had discriminant validity. Oops.Another widely used self-report measure of mindfulness, inone study, showed a positive correlation between binge drinkingand mindfulness—the more drinking, the greater the mindfulness.Seems like something is off-base here!20 And a small study withtwelve seasoned (average of 5,800 hours of practice) and twelvemore expert meditators (average of 11,000 hours of practice)found they did not differ from a nonmeditating group on two verycommonly used questionnaire measures of mindfulness, perhapsbecause they are more aware of the wanderings of their mind thanmost people.21Any questionnaire that asks people to report on themselvescan be susceptible to skews. One researcher put it more bluntly:“These can be gamed.” For that reason the Davidson group hascome up with what they consider a more robust behavioralmeasure: your ability to maintain focus as you count your breaths,one by one.This is not as simple as it may sound. In the test you press thedown arrow on a keyboard on each outbreath. And to up the odds,on every ninth exhale you tap a different key, the right arrow.Then you start counting your breaths from one to nine again.22The strength of this test: the difference between your countandthe actual number of breaths you took renders an objectivemeasure far less prone to psychological bias. When your mindwanders, your counting accuracy suffers. As expected, expertmeditators perform significantly better than nonmeditators, andscores on this test improve with training in mindfulness.23All of this cautionary review—the troubles with our firstattempts at meditation research, the advantages of an activecontrol group, the need for more rigor and precision in measuringmeditation impacts—seems a fitting prelude to our wading intothe rising sea of research on meditation.In summarizing these results we’ve tried to apply the strictestexperimental standards, which lets us focus on the very strongestfindings. This means setting aside the vast majority of research inmeditation—including results scientists view as questionable,inconclusive, or otherwise marred.As we’ve seen, our somewhat flawed research methods duringour Harvard graduate school days reflected the general quality—orlack of it—during the first decades of meditation studies, the 1970sand 1980s. Today our initial research attempts would not meetour own standards to be included here. Indeed, a large proportionof meditation studies in one way or another fail to meet the goldstandards for research methods that are essential for publicationin the top, “A-level” scientific journals.To be sure, over the years there has been a ratcheting upwardof sophistication as the number of studies of meditation hasexploded to more than one thousand per year. This tsunami ofmeditation research creates a foggy picture, with a confusingwelter of results. Beyond our focus on the strongest findings, wetry to highlight the meaningful patterns within that chaos.We’ve broken down this mass of findings along the lines oftrait changes described in the classic literature of many greatspiritual traditions. We see such texts as offering workinghypotheses from ancient times for today’s research.We’ve also related these trait changes to the brain systemsinvolved, wherever the data allow. The four main neural pathwaysmeditation transforms are, first, those for reacting to disturbingevents—stress and our recovery from it (which Dan tried not sosuccessfully to document). As we will see, the second brain system,for compassion and empathy, turns out to be remarkably ready foran upgrade. The third, circuitry for attention, Richie’s earlyinterest, also improves in several ways—no surprise, given thatmeditation at its core retrains our habits of focus. The fourthneural system, for our very sense of self, gets little press in moderntalk about meditation, though it has traditionally been a majortarget for alteration.When these strands of change are twined together, there aretwo major ways anyone benefits from contemplative effort: havinga healthy body and a healthy mind. We devote chapters to theresearch on each of these.In teasing out the main trait effects of meditation, we faced agargantuan task—one that we’ve simplified by limiting ourconclusions to the very best studies. This more rigorous lookcontrasts with the too-common practice of accepting findings—and touting them—simply because they are published in a “peer-reviewed” journal. For one, academic journals themselves vary inthe standards by which peers review articles; we’ve favored A-leveljournals, those with the highest standards. For another, we’velooked carefully at the methods used, rather than ignoring themany drawbacks and limitations to these published studies thatare dutifully listed at the ends of such articles.To start, Richie’s research group gathered an exhaustivecollection for a given topic like compassion from all journalarticles published on the effects of meditation. They thenwinnowed them to select those that met the highest standards ofexperimental design. So, for example, of the original 231 reportson cultivating loving-kindness or compassion, only 37 met topdesign standards. And when Richie looked through the lenses ofdesign strength and of importance, eliminated overlap, andotherwise distilled them, this closer scrutiny shrank that numberto 8 or so studies, whose findings we talk about in chapter six,“Primed for Love,” along with a few others that raise compellingissues.Our scientific colleagues might expect a far more detailed—okay, obsessive—accounting of all the relevant studies, but that’snot our agenda here. That said, we should nod with greatappreciation to the many research efforts we did not includewhose findings agree with our account (or disagree, or add atwist), some excellent and some not so.But let’s keep this simple.E5A Mind Undisturbedverything you do, be it great or small, is but one-eighth ofthe problem,” a sixth-century Christian monk admonishedhis fellow renunciates, “whereas to keep one’s state undisturbedeven if thereby one should fail to accomplish the task, is the otherseven-eighths.”1A mind undisturbed marks a prominent goal of meditationpaths in all the great spiritual traditions. Thomas Merton, aTrappist contemplative, wrote his own version of a poem laudingthis very quality, taken from the ancient annals of Taoism. He tellsof a craftsman who could draw perfect circles without using acompass, and whose mind was “free and without concern.”2A mind unworried has as its opposite the angst life brings us:money worries, working too hard, family problems, healthtroubles. In nature, stress episodes like encountering a predatorare temporary, giving the body time to recover. In modern lifestressors are mostly psychological, not biological, and can beongoing (if only in our thoughts), like a horrific boss or troublewith family. Such stressors trigger those same ancient biologicalreactions. If these stress reactions last for a long time, they canmake us sick.Our vulnerability to stress-worsened diseases like diabetes orhypertension reflects the downside in our brain’s design. Theupside reflects the glories of the human cortex, which has builtcivilizations (and the computer this is being written on). But thebrain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in ourprefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among allanimals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipatethe future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.As Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, put it centuries ago, it’s notthe things that happen to us that are upsetting but the view wetake of those doings. A more modern sentiment comes from poetCharles Bukowski: it’s not the big things that drive us mad, but“the shoelace that snaps with no time left.”The science here shows that the more we perceive such hasslesin our lives, the higher our levels of stress hormones like cortisol.That’s a bit ominous: cortisol, if raised chronically, has deleteriousimpacts like an increased risk of dying from heart disease.3 Canmeditation help?FROM THE BACK OF AN ENVELOPEWe first got to know Jon Kabat-Zinn during our Harvard days,when he had just finished his PhD in molecular biology at MITand was exploring meditation and yoga. Jon was a student ofKorean Zen master Seung Sahn, who had a meditation center inthe same Cambridge neighborhood where Dan was living. And notfar away, in Richie’s second-floor apartment off Harvard Square,Jon gave Richie his first instruction in meditation and yoga,shortly before Richie’s trip to India.A like-minded meditating scientist, Jon had joined our teamwhen we studied Swami X at Harvard Medical School. Jon hadjust gotten a fellowship in anatomy and cell biology at the newlyopened University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester,an hour’s drive from Cambridge. The anatomy was whatinterested him most—Jon had already begun teaching yoga classesin Cambridge.In those days Jonoften went on retreats at the InsightMeditation Society (IMS), then recently founded, in Barre, alsoabout an hour away from Boston and not far from Worcester. In1974, several years before IMS was founded, Jon had spent twoweeks one freezing early April in an unheated Girl Scout camp inthe Berkshires, rented for a vipassana course. The teacher, RobertHover, had been commissioned to teach by the Burmese master UBa Khin, who, you might remember, was also the teacher of S. N.Goenka, whose retreats Dan and Richie attended in India.Like Goenka, the main methods Hover taught were, initially,to focus on your breath in order to build concentration for the firstthree days of the retreat, and then to systematically scan thebody’s sensations very slowly, from head to toe, over and overagain for the next seven days. During the scan you focused only onthe bare bodily sensations—the norm in that meditation lineage.Hover’s instructions included several two-hour meditationsittings during which students vowed not to make a singlevoluntary movement—twice as long as those at Goenka’s courses.These immobile sessions produced a level of pain, Jon said, he hadnever experienced in his life. But as he sat through thatunbearable pain and scanned his body to focus on his experience,the pain dissolved into pure sensations.On this retreat Jon had an insight, which he quickly wrotedown on the back of an envelope, that there might be a way toshare the benefits of meditation practices with medical patients,especially those experiencing chronic pain that wouldn’t go awayjust by changing their posture or stopping the meditation practice.Coupled with a sudden vision that came to him a few years lateron a retreat at IMS and that drew together disparate parts of hisown practice history into a form that would be accessible toanyone, the program now known around the world asmindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, came into being inSeptember of 1979 at the University of Massachusetts MedicalCenter.4In his vision he realized that pain clinics are filled with peoplewhose symptoms are excruciating and who can’t escape the painexcept through debilitating narcotics. He saw that the body scanand other mindfulness practices could help these patientsuncouple the cognitive and emotional parts of their experience ofpain from the pure sensation, a perceptual shift that can itself be asignificant relief.But most of these patients—a random slice of folks from theworking-class environs of Worcester—could not sit still for longperiods of time like the dedicated meditators Hover taught. So Jonadapted a method from his yoga training, a lying-down body scanmeditation which, similar to the Hover approach, has you connectwith and then move through key regions of the body in asystematic sequence, starting with the toes of the left foot, andwinding up at the top of the head. The key point: it is possible toregister and then investigate and transform your relationship towhatever you are sensing at a given place in the body, even if it ishighly unpleasant.Borrowing from both his Zen background and vipassana, Jonadded a sitting meditation where people pay careful attention totheir breath, letting go of thoughts or sensations that arise—justbeing aware of attending itself, not of the object of attention, thebreath at the beginning, and then other objects such as sounds,thoughts, emotions, and of course, bodily sensations of all kinds.And, taking another cue from Zen and vipassana, he addedmindful walking, mindful eating, and a general awareness of life’sactivities, including one’s relationships.We were pleased that Jon pointed to our Harvard research asevidence (otherwise pretty scant in those days) that methodstaken from contemplative paths and put in new forms withouttheir spiritual context could have benefits in the modern world.5These days that evidence has grown more than ample; MBSR hasrisen to the top of meditation practices undergoing scientificscrutiny. MBSR may be the most widely practiced form ofmindfulness anywhere, taught around the world in hospitals andclinics, schools, even businesses. One of the many benefits claimedfor MBSR: boosting how well people handle stress.In an early study of the impact of MBSR on stress reactivity,Philippe Goldin (an SRI attendee) and his mentor at StanfordUniversity, James Gross, studied a small group of patients withsocial anxiety disorder who underwent the standard eight-weekMBSR program.6 Before and after the training, they went into thefMRI scanner, while being presented with stressors—statementstaken from their own tales of social “meltdowns” and theirthoughts during them—for example, “I am incompetent,” or “I amashamed of my shyness.”As these stressful thoughts were presented, the patients usedeither of two different attentional stances: mindful awareness oftheir breath or distraction by doing mental arithmetic. Onlymindfulness of their breath both lowered activity in the amygdala—mainly via a faster recovery—and strengthened it in the brain’sattentional networks, while the patients reported less stressreactivity. The same beneficial pattern emerged when the patientswho had done MBSR were compared with some who had trainedin aerobics.7That is but one of many hundreds of studies that have beendone on MBSR, revealing a multitude of payoffs, as we’ll seethroughout this book. But the same can be said for MBSR’s closecousin, mindfulness itself.MINDFUL ATTENTIONWhen we started to participate in dialogues between the DalaiLama and scientists at the Mind and Life Institute, we wereimpressed by the precision with which one of his interpreters,Alan Wallace, was able to equate scientific terms with theirequivalent meanings in Tibetan, a language lacking any suchtechnical terminology. Alan, it turned out, had a PhD in religiousstudies from Stanford University, extensive familiarity withquantum physics, and rigorous philosophical training, in part as aTibetan Buddhist monk for several years.Drawing on his contemplative expertise, Alan developed aunique program that extracts from the Tibetan context ameditation practice accessible to anyone, what he calls MindfulAttention Training. This program starts with full focus on thebreath, then progressively refines attention to observe the naturalflow of the mind stream and finally rest in the subtle awareness ofawareness itself.8In a study at Emory, people who had never meditatedpreviously were randomly assigned to practice Mindful AttentionTraining or a compassion meditation. A third group, an activecontrol, went through a series of discussions on health.9The participants were scanned before and after theyunderwent eight weeks of training. While in the scanner theyviewed a set of images—standard in emotion research—whichincludes a few upsetting ones, such as a burn victim. The MindfulAttention group showed reduced amygdala activity in response tothe disturbing pictures. The changes in amygdala functionoccurred in the ordinary baseline state in this study, suggestingthe seeds of a trait effect.A word about the amygdala, which has a privileged role as thebrain’s radar for threat: it receives immediate input from oursenses, which it scans for safety or danger. If it perceives a threat,the amygdala circuitry triggers the brain’s freeze-fight-or-flightresponse, a stream of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline thatmobilize us for action. The amygdala also responds to anythingimportant to pay attention to, whether we like or dislike it.The sweat dollops Dan measured in his study were distantindicators of this amygdala-driven reaction. In effect, Dan wastrying to tease out a change in amygdala function—a quickerrecovery from arousal—but was using a hopelessly indirect metricwith the sweat response. That wasin a day long before theinvention of scanners that directly track activity in brain regions.The amygdala connects strongly to brain circuitry for bothfocusing our attention and for intense emotional reactions. Thisdual role explains why, when we are in the grip of anxiety, we arealso very distracted, especially by whatever is making us anxious.As the brain’s radar for threat, the amygdala rivets our attentionon what it finds troubling. So when something worries or upsetsus, our mind wanders over and over to that thing, even to thepoint of fixation—like the viewers of the shop accident film whenthey saw Al’s thumb approach that wicked saw blade.About the same time as Alan’s findings that mindfulness calmsthe amygdala, other researchers had volunteers who had nevermeditated before practice mindfulness for just twenty minutes aday over one week, and then have an fMRI scan.10 During the scanthey saw images ranging from gruesome burn victims to cutebunnies. They watched these images in their everyday state ofmind, and then while practicing mindfulness.During mindful attention their amygdala response wassignificantly lower (compared to nonmeditators) to all the images.This sign of being less disturbed, tellingly, was greatest in theamygdala on the brain’s right side (there are amygdalae in bothright and left hemispheres), which often has a stronger responseto whatever upsets us than the one on the left.In this second study, lessened amygdala reactivity was foundonly during mindful attention and not during ordinary awareness,indicating a state effect, not an altered trait. A trait change,remember, is the “before,” not the “after.”PAIN IS IN THE BRAINIf you give the back of your hand a hard pinch, different brainsystems mobilize, some for the pure sensation of pain and othersfor our dislike of that pain. The brain unifies them into a visceral,instant Ouch!But that unity falls apart when we practice mindfulness of thebody, spending hours noticing our bodily sensations in greatdetail. As we sustain this focus, our awareness morphs.What had been a painful pinch transforms, breaking down intoits constituents: the intensity of the pinch and the painfulsensation, and the emotional feeling tone—we don’t want the pain;we urgently want the pain to stop.But if we persevere with mindful investigation, that pinchbecomes an experience to unpack with interest, even equanimity.We can see our aversion fall away, and the “pain” break down intosubtler flavors: throbbing, heat, intensity.Imagine now you hear a soft rumble as a five-gallon tank ofwater starts boiling and sends a stream of fluid through the thinrubber hose that runs through the two-inch square metal platestrapped tight on your wrist. The plate heats up, pleasantly at first.But that pleasantness quickly heads toward pain, as the watertemperature jumps several degrees within a couple of seconds.Finally, you can’t take it anymore—if this were a hot stove you hadtouched, you would instantly pull away. But you can’t remove thatmetal plate. You feel the almost excruciating heat for a full tenseconds, sure you are getting burned.But you get no burn; your skin is fine. You’ve just reached yourhighest pain threshold, exactly what this device, the Medocthermal stimulator, was designed to detect. Used by neurologiststo assess conditions like neuropathy that reveal deterioration ofthe central nervous system, the thermal stimulator has built-insafety devices so people’s skin won’t be burned, even as itcalibrates precisely their maximum pain threshold. And people’spain thresholds are nowhere near the higher range at which burnsoccur. That’s why the Medoc has been used with experimentalvolunteers to establish how meditation alters our perceptions ofpain.Among pain’s main components are our purely physiologicalsensations, like burning, and our psychological reactions to thosesensations.11 Meditation, the theory goes, might mute ouremotional response to pain and so make the heat sensations morebearable.In Zen, for example, practitioners learn to suspend theirmental reactions and categorization of whatever arises in theirminds or around them, and this mental stance gradually spillsover into everyday life.12 “The experienced practitioner of zazendoes not depend on sitting quietly,” as Ruth Sasaki, a Zen teacher,put it, adding, “States of consciousness at first attained only in themeditation hall gradually become continuous in any and allactivities.”13Seasoned Zen meditators who were having their brainsscanned (and who were asked to “not meditate”) endured thethermal stimulator.14 While we’ve noted the reasons to have anactive control group, this research had none. But that’s less anissue here, because of the brain imaging. If the outcome measuresare based on self-reports (the most easily swayed by expectations)or even behavior observed by someone else (somewhat lesssusceptible to bias) then an active control group matters greatly.But when it comes to their brain activity, people have no cluewhat’s going on, and so an active control matters less.The more experienced among the Zen students not only wereable to bear more pain than could controls, they also displayedlittle activity in executive, evaluative, and emotion areas duringthe pain—all regions that ordinarily flare into activity when we areunder such intense stress. Tellingly, their brains seemed todisconnect the usual link between executive center circuits wherewe evaluate (This hurts!) and circuitry for sensing physical pain(This burns).In short, the Zen meditators seemed to respond to pain asthough it was a more neutral sensation. In more technicallanguage, their brains showed a “functional decoupling” of thehigher and lower brain regions that register pain—while theirsensory circuitry felt the pain, their thoughts and emotions did notreact to it. This offers a new twist on a strategy sometimes used incognitive therapy: reappraisal of severe stress—thinking about itin a less threatening way—which can lessen its subjective severityas well as the brain’s response. Here, though, the Zen meditatorsseemed to apply a no-appraisal neural strategy—in keeping withthe mind-set of zazen itself.A close reading of this article reveals a mention only in passingof a significant trait effect, in a difference found between Zenmeditators and the comparison group. During the initial baselinereading the temperature is increased in a staircase-like series offinely graduated rises to calibrate the precise maximum painthreshold for each person. The Zen practitioners’ pain thresholdwas 2 degrees Centigrade (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than fornonmeditators.This may not sound like much, but the way we experience painfrom heat means that slight increases in temperature can havedramatic impact both subjectively and in how our brain responds.Though that difference of 2 degrees Centigrade may seem trivial,in the world of pain experience, it is huge.Researchers are, appropriately, skeptical about such traitlikefindings because self-selection in who chooses to stick withmeditation and who drops out along the way might also accountfor such data; perhaps people who choose to meditate for yearsand years are already different in ways that look like trait effects.The maxim “Correlation does not mean causation” applies here.But if a trait can be understood as a lasting effect of thepractice, that poses an alternative explanation. And when differentresearch groups come up with similar trait findings, theseconverging results make us take the result more seriously.Contrast the Zen sitters’ recovery from stress reactivity withburnout, the depleted, hopeless state that comes from years ofconstant, unremitting pressures, like from jobs that demand toomuch. Burnout has becomebeen vastly overshadowed by the sheer delight we find in workingtogether. We’ve been best friends for decades but laboredseparately over most of our careers. This book has brought ustogether again, always a joy.You are holding the book we had always wanted to write butcould not. The science and the data we needed to support ourideas have only recently matured. Now that both have reached acritical mass, we are delighted to share this.Our joy also comes from our sense of a shared, meaningfulmission: we aim to shift the conversation with a radicalreinterpretation of what the actual benefits of meditation are—andare not—and what the true aim of practice has always been.THE DEEP PATHAfter his return from India in the fall of 1974, Richie was in aseminar on psychopathology back at Harvard. Richie, with longhair and attire in keeping with the zeitgeist of Cambridge in thosetimes—including a colorful woven sash that he wore as a belt—wasstartled when his professor said, “One clue to schizophrenia is thebizarre way a person dresses,” giving Richie a meaningful glance.And when Richie told one of his Harvard professors that hewanted to focus his dissertation on meditation, the blunt responsecame immediately: that would be a career-ending move.Dan set out to research the impacts of meditation that uses amantra. On hearing this, one of his clinical psychology professorsasked with suspicion, “How is a mantra any different from myobsessive patients who can’t stop saying ‘shit-shit-shit’?”1 Theexplanation that the expletives are involuntary in thepsychopathology, while the silent mantra repetition is a voluntaryand intentional focusing device, did little to placate him.These reactions were typical of the opposition we faced fromour department heads, who were still responding with knee-jerknegativity toward anything to do with consciousness—perhaps amild form of PTSD after the notorious debacle involving TimothyLeary and Richard Alpert. Leary and Alpert had been very publiclyousted from our department in a brouhaha over letting Harvardundergrads experiment with psychedelics. This was some fiveyears before we arrived, but the echoes lingered.Despite our academic mentors’ seeing our meditation researchas a blind alley, our hearts told us this was of compelling import.We had a big idea: beyond the pleasant states meditation canproduce, the real payoffs are the lasting traits that can result.An altered trait—a new characteristic that arises from ameditation practice—endures apart from meditation itself. Alteredtraits shape how we behave in our daily lives, not just during orimmediately after we meditate.The concept of altered traits has been a lifelong pursuit, eachof us playing synergistic roles in the unfolding of this story. Therewere Dan’s years in India as an early participant-observer in theAsian roots of these mind-altering methods. And on Dan’s returnto America he was a not-so-successful transmitter tocontemporary psychology of beneficial changes from meditationand the ancient working models for achieving them.Richie’s own experiences with meditation led to decadespursuing the science that supports our theory of altered traits. Hisresearch group has now generated the data that lend credence towhat could otherwise seem mere fanciful tales. And by leading thecreation of a fledgling research field, contemplative neuroscience,he has been grooming a coming generation of scientists whosework builds on and adds to this evidence.In the wake of the tsunami of excitement over the wide path,the alternate route so often gets missed: that is, the deep path,which has always been the true goal of meditation. As we see it,the most compelling impacts of meditation are not better health orsharper business performance but, rather, a further reach towardour better nature.A stream of findings from the deep path markedly boostsscience’s models of the upper limits of our positive potential. Thefurther reaches of the deep path cultivate enduring qualities likeselflessness, equanimity, a loving presence, and impartialcompassion—highly positive altered traits.When we began, this seemed big news for modern psychology—if it would listen. Admittedly, at first the concept of altered traitshad scant backing save for the gut feelings we had from meetinghighly seasoned practitioners in Asia, the claims of ancientmeditation texts, and our own fledgling tries at this inner art.Now, after decades of silence and disregard, the last few yearshave seen ample findings that bear out our early hunch. Only oflate have the scientific data reached critical mass, confirming whatour intuition and the texts told us: these deep changes are externalsigns of strikingly different brain function.Much of that data comes from Richie’s lab, the only scientificcenter that has gathered findings on dozens of contemplativemasters, mainly Tibetan yogis—the largest pool of deeppractitioners studied anywhere.These unlikely research partners have been crucial in buildinga scientific case for the existence of a way of being that has eludedmodern thought, though it was hiding in plain sight as a goal ofthe world’s major spiritual traditions. Now we can share scientificconfirmation of these profound alterations of being—atransformation that dramatically ups the limits on psychologicalscience’s ideas of human possibility.The very idea of “awakening”—the goal of the deep path—seems a quaint fairy tale to a modern sensibility. Yet data fromRichie’s lab, some just being published in journals as this bookgoes to press, confirm that remarkable, positive alterations inbrain and behavior along the lines of those long described for thedeep path are not a myth but a reality.THE WIDE PATHWe have both been longtime board members of the Mind and LifeInstitute, formed initially to create intensive dialogues betweenthe Dalai Lama and scientists on wide-ranging topics.2 In 2000 weorganized one on “destructive emotions,” with several top expertson emotions, including Richie.3 Midway through that dialogue theDalai Lama, turning to Richie, made a provocative challenge.His own tradition, the Dalai Lama observed, had a wide arrayof time-tested practices for taming destructive emotions. So, heurged, take these methods into the laboratory in forms freed fromreligious trappings, test them rigorously, and if they can helppeople lessen their destructive emotions, then spread them widelyto all who might benefit.That fired us up. Over dinner that night—and several nightsfollowing—we began to plot the general course of the research wereport in this book.The Dalai Lama’s challenge led Richie to refocus theformidable power of his lab to assess both the deep and the widepaths. And, as founding director of the Center for Healthy Minds,Richie has spurred work on useful, evidence-based applicationssuitable for schools, clinics, businesses, even for cops—for anyone,anywhere, ranging from a kindness program for preschoolers totreatments for veterans with PTSD.The Dalai Lama’s urging catalyzed studies that support thewide path in scientific terms, a vernacular welcomed around theglobe. Meanwhile the wide way has gone viral, becoming the stuffof blogs, tweets, and snappy apps. For instance, as we write this, awave of enthusiasm surrounds mindfulness, and hundreds ofthousands—maybe millions—now practice the method.But viewing mindfulness (or any variety of meditation)through a scientific lens starts with questions like: When does itwork, and when does it not? Will this method help everyone? Areits benefits any different from, say, exercise? These are among thequestions that brought us to write this book.Meditation is a catch-all word for myriad varieties ofcontemplative practice, just as sports refers to a wide range ofathletic activities.rampant among health careprofessions such as nurses and doctors, as well as those who careat home for loved ones with problems like Alzheimer’s. And, ofcourse, anyone can feel burned-out who faces the rants of rudecustomers or continual implacable deadlines, as with the hecticpace of a business start-up.Such constant stress sculpts the brain for the worse, it seems.15Brain scans of people who for years had faced work thatdemanded up to seventy hours each week revealed enlargedamygdalae and weak connections between areas in the prefrontalcortex that can quiet the amygdala in a disturbing moment. Andwhen those stressed-out workers were asked to reduce theiremotional reaction to upsetting pictures, they were unable to do so—technically, a failure in “down-regulation.”Like people who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome,victims of burnout are no longer able to put a halt to their brain’sstress response—and so, never have the healing balm of recoverytime.There are tantalizing results that indirectly supportmeditation’s role in resilience. A collaboration between Richie’slab and the research group directed by Carol Ryff looked at asubset of participants in a large, multisite, national study ofmidlife in the United States. They found that the stronger aperson’s sense of purpose in life, the more quickly they recoveredfrom a lab stressor.16Having a sense of purpose and meaning may let people meetlife’s challenges better, reframing them in ways that allow them torecover more readily. And, as we saw in chapter three, meditationseems to enhance well-being on Ryff’s measure, which includes aperson’s sense of purpose. So what’s the direct evidence thatmeditation can help us meet upsets and challenges with moreaplomb?BEYOND CORRELATIONWhen Dan taught the psychology of consciousness course in 1975at Harvard, Richie, then in his last year of graduate school, was, asmentioned, a teaching assistant. Among the students he met withweekly was Cliff Saron, then a senior at Harvard. Cliff had a knackfor the technical end of research, including the electronics(perhaps a legacy of his father, Bob Saron, who had managed thesound equipment at NBC). Cliff’s adeptness soon made him acoauthor on research papers with Richie.And when Richie got his first teaching post at the StateUniversity of New York at Purchase, he took Cliff along to managethe laboratory. After a stint there—and coauthoring a slew ofscientific papers with Richie—Cliff got his own PhD inneuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He nowdirects a lab at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University ofCalifornia at Davis, and has often been on the faculty at the Mindand Life Summer Research Institute.Cliff’s astute sense of methodological issues no doubt helpedhim design and run a crucial bit of research, one of the fewlongitudinal studies of meditation to date.17 With Alan Wallace asretreat leader, Cliff put together a rigorous battery of assessmentsfor students going through a three-month training in a range ofclassic meditation styles, including some, like mindfulness ofbreathing, meant to increase focus and others to cultivate positivestates like loving-kindness and equanimity. While the “yogis”pursued their demanding schedule of meditating six or morehours a day for ninety days, Cliff had them take a battery of testsat the beginning, middle, and end of the retreat, and five monthsafter the retreat had concluded.18The comparison group was people who had signed up for thethree-month retreat but who did not start until the first groupfinished. Such a “wait-list” control eliminates worries aboutexpectation demand and similar psychological confounds (butdoes not add an active control like HEP—which would be a logisticand financial burden in a study like this). A stickler for precisionin research, Cliff flew people in the wait-list group to the retreatplace and gave them exactly the same assessments in the identicalcontext as those in the retreat.One test presented lines of different lengths in rapidsuccession, with the instruction to press one button for a line thatwas shorter than the others. Only one out of ten lines was short;the challenge is to inhibit the knee-jerk tendency to press thebutton for a short line when a long one appears. As the retreatprogressed, so did the ability of the meditators to control thisimpulse—a mirror on a skill critical to managing our emotion, thecapacity to refrain from acting on whim or impulse.This simple skill, statistical analyses suggested, led to a rangeof improvements on self-reports, from less anxiety to an overallsense of well-being, including emotion regulation as gauged byreports of recovering more quickly from upsets and more freedomfrom impulses. Tellingly, the wait-list controls showed no changein any of these measures—but showed the same improvementsonce they had gone through the retreat.Cliff’s study directly ties these benefits to meditation, lendingstrong support to the case for altered traits. A clincher: a follow-upfive months after the retreats ended found that the improvementsremained.And the study dispels doubts that all the positive traits foundin long-term meditators are simply due to self-selection, wherepeople who already had those traits choose the practice or staywith it in the long run. From evidence like this, it seems likely thatthe states we practice in meditation gradually spill over into dailylife to mold our traits—at least when it comes to handling stress.A DEVILISH ORDEALImagine you are describing your qualifications for a job while twointerviewers glare at you, unsmiling. Their faces reveal noempathy, not even an encouraging nod. That’s the situation in theTrier Social Stress Test (TSST), one of the most reliable waysknown to science to trigger the brain’s stress circuits and itscascade of stress hormones.Now imagine, after that dispiriting job interview, doing somepressured mental arithmetic: you have to subtract 13s in rapid-firesuccession from a number like 1,232. That’s the second part of theTrier test, and those same impassive interviewers push you to dothe math faster and faster—and whenever you make a mistake,they tell you to start all over at 1,232. That devilish test delivers ahuge dose of social stress, the awful feelings we get when otherpeople evaluate, reject, or exclude us.Alan Wallace and Paul Ekman created a renewal program forschoolteachers that combined psychological training withmeditation.19 Whereas Dan had used the shop accident film tobring stress into the lab, here the stressor was the Trier test’ssimulated job interview followed by that formidable mathchallenge.The more hours those teachers had practiced meditation, thequicker their blood pressure recovered from a high point duringthe TSST. This was true five months after the program ended,suggesting at least a mild trait effect (five years afterward wouldbe still stronger evidence of a trait).Richie’s lab used the Trier with seasoned (lifetime average =9,000 hours) vipassana meditators who did an eight-hour day ofmeditation and the next day underwent the test.20 The meditatorsand their age- and gender-matched comparison group all wentthrough the TSST (as well as a test for inflammation—more onthose results in chapter nine, “Mind, Body, and Genome”).Result: the meditators had a smaller rise in cortisol during thestress. Just as important, the meditators perceived that dreadedTrier test as less stressful than did the nonmeditators.This cooled-out, more balanced way of viewing that stressoramong the seasoned meditators was not tapped while they werepracticing but while they were at rest—our “before.” Their easeduring both the stressful interview and the formidable mentalmath challenge seems a genuine trait effect.Further evidence for this comes from research with these sameadvanced meditators.21 The meditators’ brains were scanned whilethey saw disturbing images of people suffering, like burn victims.The seasoned practitioners’ brains revealed a lowered level ofreactivity in the amygdala; they were more immune to emotionalhijacking.The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivitybetween the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and theamygdala, which triggers such reactions. As neuroscientists know,the stronger this particular link in the brain, the less a person willbe hijacked by emotional downs and ups of all sorts.This connectivity modulates a person’s level of emotionalreactivity: the stronger the link, the less reactive. Indeed, thatrelationship is so strong that a person’s reactivity level can bepredicted by the connectivity. So, when these high-lifetime-hourmeditators saw an image of a gruesome-looking burn victim, theyhad little amygdala reactivity. Age-matched volunteers did notshow either the heightened connectivity or the equanimity onviewing the disturbing images.But when Richie’s group repeated this study with peopletaking the MBSR training (a total of just under thirty hours) plus abit of daily at-home practice, they failed to find any strengtheningof connection between the prefrontal region and the amygdaladuring the challenge of upsetting images. Nor was there any whenthe MBSR group simply rested.While MBSR training did reduce the reactivity of theamygdala, the long-term meditator group showed both thisreduced reactivity in the amygdala plus strengthening of theconnection between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. Thispattern implies that when the going gets tough—for example, inresponse to a major life challenge such as losing a job—the abilityto manage distress (which depends upon the connectivity betweenthe prefrontal cortex and amygdala) will be greater in long-termmeditators compared to those who have only done the MBSRtraining.The good news is that this resilience can be learned. What wedon’t know is how long this effect might last. We suspect that itwould be short-lived unless participants continued to practice, akey to transforming a state into a trait.Among those who show the most short-lived amygdalaresponse, emotions come and go, adaptive and appropriate.Richie’s lab put this idea to the test with brain scans of 31 highlyseasoned meditators (lifetime average was 8,800 hours ofmeditation practice, ranging from just 1,200 to more than30,000).They saw the usual pictures ranging from people in extremesuffering (burn victims) to cute bunnies. On first analysis of theexpert meditators’ amygdalae, there was no difference in how theyreacted from the responses of matched volunteers who had nevermeditated. But when Richie’s group divided the seasonedmeditators into those with the least hours of practice (lifetimeaverage 1,849 hours) and the most (lifetime average 7,118), theresults showed that the more hours of practice, the more quicklythe amygdala recovered from distress.22This rapid recovery is the hallmark of resilience. In short,equanimity emerges more strongly with extended practice. Amongthe benefits of long-term meditation, this tells us, are exactly whatthose Desert Fathers were after: a mind undisturbed.IN A NUTSHELLThe amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, showsdampened activity from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSRpractice. Other mindfulness training shows a similar benefit, andthere are hints in the research that these changes are traitlike:they appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceivethe stressful stimuli mindfully but even in the “baseline” state,with reductions in amygdala activation as great as 50 percent.Such lessening of the brain’s stress reactions appears in responsenot simply to seeing the gory pictures used in the laboratory butalso to more real-life challenges like the stressful Trier interviewbefore a live audience. More daily practice seems associated withlessened stress reactivity. Experienced Zen practitioners canwithstand higher levels of pain, and have less reaction to thisstressor. A three-month meditation retreat brought indicators ofbetter emotional regulation, and long-term practice wasassociated with greater functional connectivity between theprefrontal areas that manage emotion and the areas of theamygdala that react to stress, resulting in less reactivity. And animproved ability to regulate attention accompanies some of thebeneficial impact of meditation on stress reactivity. Finally, thequickness with which long-term meditators recover from stressunderlines how trait effects emerge with continued practice.I6Primed for Loven arid landscapes during ancient times, grapes were rare, asucculent delicacy grown in distant regions. Yet one day,records from the second century AD tell us, someone brought justsuch a treat all the way to the desert abode of Macarius, aChristian hermit.1But Macarius did not eat the grapes; instead he gave them toanother hermit nearby who was feeble and who seemed in greaterneed of the treat.And that hermit, though grateful for Macarius’s kindness,thought of yet another among them who would benefit from eatingthe grapes, and passed them on to that monk. So it went throughthe entire hermit community until the grapes came around againto Macarius.Those early Christian hermits, known as Desert Fathers,lauded the same wholesome modes of being as do yogis in theHimalayas today, who follow surprisingly similar discipline,customs, and meditative practices. They share an ethic ofselflessness and generosity and live in isolation, the better toimmerse themselves in meditation.What propelled those juicy grapes’ journey through that desertcommune? The drivers were compassion and loving-kindness, theattitude of putting the needs of others ahead of our own.Technically, “loving-kindness” refers to wishing that other peoplebe happy; its near cousin “compassion” entails the wish thatpeople be relieved of suffering. Both outlooks (which we’ll justrefer to as “compassion”) can be strengthened through mindtraining—and if successful, the result will be acting to help others,as demonstrated by the Desert Fathers and that bunch of grapes.But consider a modern update. Divinity students at atheological seminary were told they would be evaluated on apractice sermon. Half were given a random selection of Bibletopics for their sermon. The other half were assigned the parableof the Good Samaritan, the man who stopped to help a stranger inneed who was lying by the side of the road, even as others walkedby, indifferent.After a time to prepare their thoughts, they went one by one toanother building, where they were evaluated on the talk they hadjust prepared. As each of them in turn passed through a courtyardon the way to give their sermon, they passed a man who was bentover and moaning in pain.The question: Did they stop to help the stranger in need?Turns out whether a divinity student helped or not dependedon how late that student felt—the more time-pressured, the lesslikely to stop.2 When we are rushing through a busy day, worriedabout getting to the next place on time, we tend literally not tonotice the people around us, let alone their needs.There’s a spectrum that runs from self-centeredpreoccupations (I’m late!), to noticing the people around us, totuning in to them, empathizing, and finally, if they are in need,acting to help.Holding the attitude of compassion means we merely espousethis virtue; embodying compassion means we act. The studentspondering the Good Samaritan likely were appreciating hiscompassion—but were not more likely to act with compassionthemselves.Several meditation methods aim to cultivate compassion.Thescientific (and ethical) question is, Does this matter—does it movepeople toward compassionate action?MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE FROMSUFFERINGDuring Dan’s first stay in India, in December 1970, he was askedto lecture at a conference on yoga and science in New Delhi.Among the many Western travelers who came to hear Dan wasSharon Salzberg, then an eighteen-year-old doing an independentstudy year from the State University of New York at Buffalo.Sharon had joined the thousands of young Westerners who madethe overland journey from Europe through the Near East to Indiain the 1970s, travel that warfare and politics have made virtuallyimpossible today.Dan mentioned that he had just come from a vipassana coursegiven by S. N. Goenka in Bodh Gaya, and that a series of these ten-day retreats was continuing. Sharon was among the handful ofWesterners who headed straight from Delhi to the Burmese viharain Bodh Gaya to take part. She became an ardent student of themethod and continued her meditation studies with teachers inIndia and Burma, and after returning to the States became ateacher herself, cofounding the Insight Meditation Society inMassachusetts—along with Joseph Goldstein, whom she met atthe vihara.Sharon has become the leading advocate of a method she firstlearned from Goenka, called metta in Pali and loosely translatedinto English as “loving-kindness”—an unconditional benevolenceand goodwill—a quality of love akin to the Greek agape.3In the format for loving-kindness that Sharon helped bring tothe West, you silently repeat phrases like “May I be safe,” “May Ibe healthy,” and “May my life unfold with ease,” first wishing thisfor yourself, then for people you love, then for neutral people, andfinally for all beings—even those whom you find difficult or whohave harmed you. In one version or another, this has become themost well-studied format of compassion meditation.This version of loving-kindness sometimes includes thecompassionate wish that people be free from suffering, too. Andthough the difference between loving-kindness and compassionmay be consequential in some way, little attention gets paid to thisdistinction in the research world.Years after her return from India, Sharon was a panelist in adialogue with the Dalai Lama in 1989, for which Dan wasmoderator.4 At one point Sharon told the Dalai Lama that manyWesterners felt loathing toward themselves. He was astonished—he’d never heard of this. He had, the Dalai Lama replied, alwaysassumed that people naturally loved themselves.Yet in English the word compassion, the Dalai Lama pointedout, signifies the wish that others be well—but it does not includeoneself. He explained that in his own language, Tibetan, as well asin the classical tongues Pali and Sanskrit, the word compassionimplies feeling this for oneself as well as others. English, he added,needs a new word, self-compassion.That very term came into the world of psychology more than adecade later when Kristin Neff, a psychologist at the University ofTexas at Austin, published her research on a measure of self-compassion. In her definition this includes being kind to yourselfinstead of self-critical; seeing your failures and mistakes as justpart of the human condition rather than some personal failing;and just noting your imperfections, not ruminating about them.The opposite of self-compassion can be seen in the constantself-criticism common, for example, in depressed ways ofthinking. Loving-kindness directed to yourself, on the other hand,would seem to offer a direct antidote. An Israeli group tested thisidea, and found that teaching loving-kindness to peopleparticularly prone to self-criticism both lessened those harshthoughts and increased their self-compassion.5EMPATHY MEANS FEELING WITHBrain research tells us of three kinds of empathy.6 Cognitiveempathy lets us understand how the other person thinks; we seetheir perspective. In emotional empathy we feel what the other isfeeling. And the third, empathic concern or caring, lies at the heartof compassion.The word empathy entered the English language only in theearly years of the twentieth century, as a translation of theGerman word Einfühlung, which might be translated as “feelingwith.” Purely cognitive empathy has no such sympathetic feelings,while the defining sign of emotional empathy is feeling in yourown body what the suffering person seems to feel.But if what we feel upsets us, all too often our next responsemeans we tune out, which helps us feel better but blockscompassionate action. In the lab one way this withdrawal instinctshows up is in people averting their gaze from photos that depictintense suffering—like a man so painfully burned that his skin haspeeled away. Similarly, homeless people complain that theybecome invisible—those passing by on the street ignore them,another form of averting the gaze from suffering.Since compassion begins with accepting what’s happeningwithout turning away—an essential first step toward taking helpfulaction—could meditations that cultivate compassion tip thebalance?Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute in Leipzigtaught volunteers a version of loving-kindness meditation.7 Thevolunteers practiced generating such loving-kindness in a six-hourinstructional session, and at home on their own.Before they had learned this loving-kindness method, whenthe volunteers saw graphic videos of people suffering, only theirnegative circuits for emotional empathy activated: their brainsreflected the state of the victims’ suffering as though it werehappening to themselves. This left them feeling upset, anemotional echo of distress that transferred from the victims tothemselves.Then people were instructed to empathize with the videos—toshare the emotions of the people they were seeing. Such empathy,fMRI studies revealed, activated circuits centering on parts of theinsula—circuits that light up when we ourselves are suffering.Empathy meant that people felt the pain of those who weresuffering.But when another group instead got instructions incompassion—feeling love for those suffering—their brainsactivated a completely different set of circuits, those for parentallove of a child.8 Their brain signature was clearly different fromthose who received instructions in empathy.And this after only eight hours!Such positive regard for a victim of suffering means we canconfront and deal with their difficulty. This allows us to movealong that spectrum from noticing what’s going on to the payoff,actually helping them. In many East Asian countries the nameKuan Yin, the revered symbol of compassionate awakening,translates as “the one who listens and hears the cries of the worldin order to come and help.”9FROM ATTITUDE TO ACTIONThe skeptical scientist has to ask, Does displaying this neuralpattern mean people will actually help, especially if doing someans they have to do something uncomfortable, even make asacrifice? Just measuring brain activity in people while they liestill in a brain scanner, and even finding that neural priming forkindness and action gets stronger, is intriguing but notconvincing. After all, those seminary students reflecting on theGood Samaritan were not more likely to actually help someone inneed.But some evidence suggests a more hopeful outcome. InRichie’s lab, volunteers’ brains were scanned before and then aftertwo weeks of either compassion training (thinking of others) orcognitive reappraisal, a self-focus, in which you are taught to thinkdifferently about the causes of negative events. Then their brainswere scanned as they viewed images of human suffering. After thebrain scan they played the Redistribution Game, where they firstwitnessed a “dictator” cheat a victim out of a fair share of $10,giving just one measlydollar. The game then let the volunteersgive up to $5 of their own money to the victim, and game rulesforced the dictator to give twice that amount to the victim.Result: those with the training in compassion gave almost twotimes as much to the victim as did the group who had learned howto reappraise their feelings. And their brain showed increasedactivation in circuits for attention, perspective taking, and positivefeelings; the more of this activation, the more altruistic.As Martin Luther King Jr. commented on the Good Samaritantale, those who did not help asked themselves, If I stop to help,what will happen to me?But the Good Samaritan asked, If I don’t stop to help, whatwill happen to him?READY TO LOVEAnyone with half a heart would find it painful to look at a photo ofa young child on the brink of starvation, his large, sad eyesdowncast, his mood sullen, his stomach distended while his bonesshow through his emaciated body.That image, like the one of the burn victim, has been used inseveral of these studies of compassion as part of a standard test ofthe ability to confront suffering. In the arc from ignoringsomeone’s pain or need, to noticing, empathizing, and then actingto help, stirring up feelings of loving-kindness energizes everystep.Studies with novices learning loving-kindness reveal an earlyharbinger of heightened amygdala reactions to images of pain andsuffering found in seasoned meditators.10 The finding wasnowhere as strong as in the long-term meditators—just a hint thatthe pattern can show up very soon.How soon? Maybe in mere minutes—at least when it comes tomood. One study found that just seven minutes of loving-kindnesspractice boosts a person’s good feelings and sense of socialconnection, if only temporarily.11 And the Davidson group hadfound that after eight or so hours of training in loving-kindness,volunteers showed strong echoes of those brain patterns found inmore experienced meditators.12 The beginners’ temporary wave ofmellow feeling may be an early precursor of the more strikingbrain changes in people who practice loving-kindness for weeks,months, or years.And consider a random group of people who volunteered to tryweb-based instruction in meditation, for a total of two and a halfhours (that is, twenty sessions of ten minutes each). This briefloving-kindness training resulted in people feeling more relaxedand donating to charity at a higher rate than those in acomparison group who did a comparable amount of light exerciselike stretching.13Pulling together findings from Richie’s lab among others, wecan piece together a neural profile of reactions to suffering.Distress circuitry connecting to the insula, including theamygdala, responds with particular strength—a pattern typical ofanyone’s empathy with other people’s pain. The insula monitorsthe signals in our body and also activates autonomic responseslike heart rate and breathing—as we empathize, our neural centersfor pain and distress echo what we pick up from the other person.And the amygdala signals something salient in the environment,in this case, the suffering of another. The more deeply immersedin the compassion meditation a person reported being, thestronger was this empathic pattern—compassion seems to amplifyempathy to suffering, just as that meditation intends.In a different study from Richie’s lab, long-term meditatorsgenerating compassion showed a strong increase in the amygdalaresponse to distressing sounds (like a woman’s scream), while forthose in a comparison group there was little difference betweencompassion and the neutral control condition.14 In a companionstudy, participants had brain scans while concentrating on a smalllight as they heard those disturbing sounds.15 In meditation-naivevolunteers, the amygdala flared into action at those sounds, whilein the meditators the amygdala response was muted and theirconcentration strong. Even those volunteers who had beenpromised a reward if they exerted effort in focusing on the light nomatter what they heard nonetheless were distracted by thescreams.Putting these findings together gives several clues about howmental training works. For one thing, very often meditation comesin batches, not as a single practice. Vipassana meditators (themajority of those in the long-term studies reported here) on atypical retreat might mix mindfulness of breathing with loving-kindness. MBSR and similar programs offer several kinds ofmental training.These various mind training methods drive the brain indifferent ways. During compassion practice, the amygdala isturned up in volume, while in focused attention on something likethe breath, the amygdala is turned down. Meditators are learninghow to change their relationship to their emotions with differentpractices.The amygdala’s circuits light up when we are exposed tosomeone feeling a strong negative emotion—fear, anger, and thelike. This amygdala signal alerts the brain that somethingimportant is happening; the amygdala acts as neural radardetecting the salience of whatever we experience. If what’s goingon seems urgent, like a woman screaming in fear, the amygdalahas extensive connections to recruit other circuitry to respond.Meanwhile the insula uses its connections to the body’svisceral organs (like the heart) to ready the body for activeengagement (increasing blood flow to the muscles, for example).Once the brain primes the body to respond, those who havemeditated on compassion are more likely to act to help someone.But then there’s the question of how long such effects ofmental training in compassion last. Is this only a temporary state,or does it become a lasting trait? Seven years after his three-month retreat experiment ended, Cliff Saron tracked down theparticipants.16 He found a surprise among those who, during andjust after the retreat, were able to sustain attention to disturbingimages of suffering—a psychophysiological measure of acceptance,as opposed to the averted gaze and expression of disgust he foundin others (and which typifies people in general).Those who did not avert their eyes but took in that sufferingwere, seven years later, better able to remember those specificpictures. In cognitive science, such memory betokens a brain thatwas able to resist an emotional hijack, and so, take in that tragicimage more fully, remember it more effectively—and, presumably,act.Unlike other benefits of meditation that emerge gradually—like a quicker recovery from stress—enhancing compassion comesmore readily. We suspect that cultivating compassion may takeadvantage of “biological preparedness,” a programmed readinessto learn a given skill, as seen, for instance, in the rapidity withwhich toddlers learn language. Just as with speaking, the brainseems primed to learn to love.This seems largely due to the brain’s caretaking circuitry,which we share with all other mammals. These are the networksthat light up when we love our children, our friends—anyone whofalls within our natural circle of caring. These circuits, amongothers, grow stronger even with short periods of compassiontraining.As we’ve seen, enhancing a compassionate attitude goesbeyond a mere outlook; people actually grow more likely to helpsomeone in need even when there’s a cost to themselves. Suchintense resonance with others’ suffering has been found in anothernotable group: extraordinary altruists, people who donated one oftheir kidneys to a stranger in dire need of a transplant. Brain scansdiscovered that these compassionate souls have a larger right-sideamygdala compared to other people of their age and gender.17Since this region activates when we empathize with someonewho is suffering, a larger amygdala may confer an unusual abilityto feel the pain of others, so motivatingpeople’s altruism—even asextraordinarily as donating a kidney to save someone’s life. Theneural changes from loving-kindness practice (the emerging signsof which are found even among beginners) align with those foundin the brains of the super-Samaritan kidney donors.18The cultivation of a loving concern for other people’s well-being has a surprising and unique benefit: the brain’s circuitry forhappiness energizes, along with compassion.19 Loving-kindnessalso boosts the connections between the brain’s circuits for joy andhappiness and the prefrontal cortex, a zone critical for guidingbehavior.20 And the greater the increase in the connectionbetween these regions, the more altruistic a person becomesfollowing compassion meditation training.NURTURING COMPASSIONWhen she was young, Tania Singer thought she might have acareer on the stage, perhaps as director of theater and opera. Andfrom her college years on, she plunged into meditation retreats ofdifferent sorts, studying with a variety of teachers as the yearswent on. The methods ranged from vipassana to Father DavidStendl-Rast’s practice of gratitude. She was drawn to teachers whoembodied a quality of unconditional love.The mysteries of the human mind drew Tania into psychology,the field in which she earned her PhD; her doctoral research onlearning in very old age got her interested in plasticity research.Her postdoc research on empathy revealed that when we witnessthe pain and suffering of someone else we activate networks whichunderlie these very same feelings in ourselves—a discovery thatgot wide attention, laying the groundwork for empathy research inneuroscience.21Our empathic resonance with the pain of others, she found,activates what amounts to a neural alarm that instantly tunes us toothers’ suffering, potentially alerting us to the presence of danger.But compassion—feeling concern for the person suffering—seemed to involve a different set of brain circuits, those forfeelings of warmth, love, and concern.This discovery originated from experiments Tania did withMatthieu Ricard, a Tibetan monk with a PhD in science—anddecades of meditation practice. Tania asked him to try a variety ofmeditative states while in a brain scanner. She wanted to see whathappened in the brain of an expert meditator in order to designmeditation practices anyone could try.When he cultivated empathy, sharing the suffering of another,she saw the action in his neural networks for pain. But once hebegan to generate compassion—loving feelings for someone whowas suffering—he activated brain circuitry for positive feelings,reward, and affiliation.Tania’s group then reverse engineered what they found withMatthieu by training groups of meditation first-timers inempathizing with a person’s suffering, or feeling compassion fortheir suffering.Compassion, she found, muted the empathic distress that canlead to emotional exhaustion and burnout (as happens sometimesin the caring professions like nursing). Instead of simply feelingwith the other person’s angst, compassion training led to thatactivation of completely different brain circuits, those for lovingconcern—and to positive feelings and resilience.22Now Tania directs the Department of Social Neuroscience atthe Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences,in Leipzig, Germany. In a melding of her meditative and scientificinterests and based on her previous promising plasticity researchon empathy and compassion training, Tania has done definitiveresearch on meditation as a way to cultivate wholesome mentalqualities such as attention, mindfulness, perspective taking,empathy, and compassion.In an elegant program of research called the ReSource ProjectTania’s group recruited around three hundred volunteers whocommitted to spending eleven months in different types ofcontemplative practices, practicing each in three modules ofseveral months—plus a comparison group that got no training buttook the same battery of tests every three months.The first mental training, “Presence,” entailed a body scan andbreath focus. Another, “Perspective,” included observing thoughtsvia a novel interpersonal practice of “contemplative dyads,” wherepartners share their stream of thought with each other for tenminutes daily, either through a cell phone app or in person.23 Thethird, “Affect,” included loving-kindness practice.Results: the scan increased body awareness and lessenedmind-wandering. Observing thoughts enhanced meta-awareness,a by-product of mindfulness. On the other hand, loving-kindnessboosted warm thoughts and feelings about others. In short, if youwant to increase your feelings of kindness most effectively,practice exactly that—not something else.WHAT’S THE ACTIVE INGREDIENT?“Samantha has HIV,” you read. “She contracted the disease from adirty needle in a doctor’s office abroad. She attends peace ralliesonce a month. She did well in high school.” Next to this thumbnailsketch you see Samantha’s photo, revealing a twenty-somethingwoman with shoulder-length hair.Would you donate money to help her out?To learn what inner factors are at work here, researchers at theUniversity of Colorado taught a compassion meditation to one setof volunteers, while an ingenious control group took a daily puff of“placebo oxytocin,” a phony feel-good brain drug, which they hadbeen told would increase their feelings of connection andcompassion. The phony drug created positive expectationsmatching that of the compassion meditators.24After either the meditation or the puff, a mobile phone appshowed each person a picture and thumbnail profile of someone inneed like Samantha, with the option to donate to them some of themoney the volunteer was being paid.Tellingly, simply doing the compassion meditation was not thestrongest predictor of whether someone donated. In fact, in thisstudy those doing the compassion meditation were no more likelyto donate than those who puffed the fake oxytocin—or a groupwho did neither. Not to get too geeky, but this raises a key pointabout the methods used in meditation research. While this studyhad a first-rate design in many respects (such as that clever fakeoxytocin control group), in at least one way the study is murky: thenature of the compassion meditation was unspecified, seems tohave changed over the course of the study, and includedmeditation that cultivates equanimity.These contemplative exercises were taken from a set designedto help people working with the dying (pastoral counselors,hospice workers) stay sensitive to suffering while feelingequanimity toward a dying person—after all, there is little or nohelp to give at that point, save a compassionate presence. Andwhile they were no more likely to donate money, those who did thecompassion meditation felt more tenderness toward the people inneed. We wonder whether equanimity may have a very differenteffect on donations than does compassion—perhaps makingsomeone less likely to, say, give money, even while resonating withthe suffering.This raises a related issue, whether you need to focus onloving-kindness to enhance compassionate acts. For example, atNortheastern University, volunteers were taught eithermindfulness or loving-kindness meditation.25 After two weeks oflessons, each found themselves in a waiting room with a womanon crutches and in apparent pain; two other people on chairsignored her, and there were only three chairs. As in the GoodSamaritan study, each of the meditators had the choice to givetheir own chair so the person on crutches could sit down.Both those who had learned mindfulness and those whopracticed loving-kindness—compared to a group who did neither—more often took the route of kindness, giving up their chair (inthe nonmeditating control group, 15 percent gaveup their chair,while for the meditators it was around 50 percent). But from thisstudy alone we don’t know whether mindfulness enhancesempathy just like loving-kindness practice, or if other inner forces—like a greater attention to circumstances—compelled that act ofcompassion.First signs suggest that each variety of meditation has its ownneural profile. Take results from research spearheaded by GesheLobsang Tenzin Negi, who has a degree in the philosophical andpractice tradition shared by the Dalai Lama (a Tibetan geshe is theequivalent of our PhD), as well as a PhD from Emory University,where he teaches. Geshe Negi drew on his background as a scholarand monk to create Cognitively-Based Compassion Training(CBCT), methods for understanding how one’s attitudes supportor hinder a compassionate response. This includes a variety ofloving-kindness meditation, aspiring to help others be happy andfree from suffering, and the determination to act accordingly.26In research at Emory, one group did CBCT, while the other didAlan Wallace’s method of meditation (we described this in chapterfive, “A Mind Undisturbed”). The main finding: the compassiongroup’s right amygdala tended to increase its activity in responseto photos of suffering, and the more hours of practice, the largerthe response. They were sharing the suffering person’s distress.But on a test of depressive thinking, the compassion groupalso reported being happier in general. Sharing another person’sfeelings of distress need not be a downer. As Dr. Aaron Beck, whodesigned that depression test, has said, when you focus onsomeone else’s suffering, you forget your own troubles.Then there’s the gender difference. The Emory Universityresearchers, for example, found women show higher levels of rightamygdala reactivity than do men in response to all emotionalimages, happy or sad, including those of suffering. This finding isnot exactly news in psychology; brain studies have long shownwomen are more attuned to other people’s emotions than aremen.27 This may be another case of science proving the obvious:women, on average, seem to be more responsive to other people’semotions than men.28Paradoxically, women do not seem more likely than menactually to act when confronted with an opportunity to help,perhaps because they sometimes feel more vulnerable.29 There aremore factors at work in compassionate action than simply a brainsignature, a fact that researchers in this area continue to strugglewith. Factors from feeling pressured for time, to whether youidentify with the person in need, to whether you are in a crowd oralone—each of these factors can matter. One open question: Willcultivating a compassionate outlook prime a person sufficiently toovercome these other forces in the face of someone’s need?WIDENING OUR CIRCLE OF CARINGA highly accomplished Tibetan meditation master studied inRichie’s lab once said that one hour spent practicing loving-kindness toward a difficult person is equivalent to one hundredhours of the same toward a friend or loved one.The generic loving-kindness meditation takes us through anever-widening circle of the kinds of people we try to hold tenderfeelings toward. The biggest leap comes when we extend lovebeyond people we know and love, to people we don’t know, letalone those we find difficult. And then after that there’s the grandaspiration to love everyone, everywhere.How can we extend the compassion we feel for our immediateloved ones to the entire human family, including people we don’tlike? This big leap in loving-kindness—were it to become morethan a mere wish—might go far in healing many divides in theworld that cause pain and conflict.The Dalai Lama sees one strategy: recognize the “oneness” ofhumankind, even groups we dislike, and so realize that “all ofthem, like ourselves, do not want suffering; they wanthappiness.”30Does this feeling of oneness help? We don’t know yet, from aresearch viewpoint. Easy to say but hard to do. One strict test ofthis shift toward universal love might measure unconscious bias—when you act outside your awareness in a prejudiced way towardsome group, despite believing you harbor no such animus.These hidden biases can be detected via clever tests. Forexample, a person may say he has no racial prejudice, yet whenpresented with a reaction time test in which words that havepleasant or unpleasant connotations are paired with the wordsblack or white, words with pleasant meaning are more quicklypaired with the word white compared with the word black, andvice versa.31Researchers at Yale University used such a measure of implicitbias before and after a six-week class in loving-kindnessmeditation.32 This research used a strong control group—teachingparticipants about the value of loving-kindness meditationwithout actually teaching them the practice. A bit like thosedivinity students pondering the Good Samaritan, this no-practicegroup showed zero benefit on the implicit bias test. The drop inunconscious prejudice came from loving-kindness.The Dalai Lama tells of his half century of working atcultivating compassion. At the start, he says, he had enormousadmiration for those who had developed genuine compassion forall beings—but he was not confident he could do so himself.He knew intellectually that such unconditional love waspossible, but that it took a certain kind of inner work to build up.As time went on, he found that the more he practiced and becamefamiliar with the feelings of compassion, the stronger his couragebecame that he, too, could develop it at the higher levels.With this penultimate variety of compassion, he adds, we areimpartial in our concern, extending it toward everyone,everywhere—even when those we feel it toward hold animositytoward us. What’s more, ideally this feeling does not come justsporadically, from time to time, but has become a compelling andstable force, a central organizing principle of our lives.And whether or not we attain that lofty height of love, thereare other benefits along the way, like how the brain’s circuitry forhappiness energizes, along with compassion. As we’ve often heardthe Dalai Lama say, “The first person to benefit from compassionis the one who feels it.”The Dalai Lama recalls an encounter at Montserrat, amonastery near Barcelona, with Padre Basili, a Christian monkwho had been in isolated retreat in a nearby mountain hermitagefor five years. What had he been doing?Meditating on love.“I noticed a glow in his eyes,” the Dalai Lama said, adding thisindicated the depth of his peace of mind and the beauty frombecoming a wonderful person. The Dalai Lama noted that he hadmet people who had everything they wanted, yet were miserable.The ultimate source of peace, he said, is in the mind—which, farmore than our circumstances, determines our happiness.33IN A NUTSHELLSimply learning about compassion does not necessarily increasecompassionate behavior. In the arc from empathizing withsomeone suffering to actually reaching out to help, loving-kindness/compassion meditation ups the odds of helping. Thereare three forms of empathy—cognitive empathy, emotionalempathy, and empathic concern. Often people empathizeemotionally with someone’s suffering but then tune out to soothetheir own uncomfortable feelings. But compassion meditationenhances empathic concern, activates circuits for good feelingsand love, as well as circuits that register the suffering of others,and prepares a person to act when suffering is encountered.Compassion and loving-kindness increase amygdala activation tosuffering while focused attention on something neutral like thebreath lessens amygdala activity. Loving-kindness acts quickly, inas little as eight hours of practice; reductions in usually intractableunconscious biasemerge after just sixteen hours. And the longerpeople practice, the stronger these brain and behavioraltendencies toward compassion become. The strength of theseeffects from the early days of meditation may signal our biologicalpreparedness for goodness.O7Attention!ne day a student asked his Zen teacher to create abrushstroke calligraphy for him, “something of greatwisdom.”The Zen master, without hesitating, took up his brush andwrote: Attention.His student, a bit dismayed, asked, “Is that all?”Without a word, the master took to his brush again, and wrote,Attention. Attention.His student, feeling that was not so profound, got a bitirritated, complaining to the master there was nothing so wiseabout that.Again the master responded in silence, writing Attention.Attention. Attention.Frustrated, the student demanded to know what he meant bythat word, attention. To which the master replied, “Attentionmeans attention.”1William James made explicit what that Zen master may havebeen hinting at: “The faculty of bringing back a wanderingattention over and over again is the very root of judgment,character and will,” he declared in his Principles of Psychology,published in 1890. James went on to say that “an education whichshould improve this faculty would be the education parexcellence.”After that bold claim he backtracked a bit adding, “But it iseasier to define this ideal than to give practical directions forbringing it about.”Richie had read this passage before he went to India, and afterhis transformative moments at the Goenka retreat, those wordsflashed back in his mind with an electric charge.This was a seminal moment, an intellectual pivot point forRichie. He had the gut sense that he had found that most excellenteducation James sought: meditation. Whatever specific form ittakes, most every kind of meditation entails retraining attention.But the research world knew little about attention back in ourgraduate school days in the 1970s. The one study that connectedmeditation to an improvement in attention was by Japaneseresearchers.2 They brought an EEG machine to a zendo andmeasured monks’ brain activity during meditation while hearing amonotonous series of sounds. While most monks showed nothingremarkable, three of the most “advanced” monks did: their brainsresponded as strongly to the twentieth sound as to the first. Thiswas big news: ordinarily the brain would tune out, showing noreaction to the tenth bing, let alone the twentieth.Tuning out a repeated sound reflects the neural process knownas habituation. Such waning in attention to anything monotonouscan plague radar operators, who have to stay vigilant whilescanning signals from mostly empty sky. Attention fatigue in radaroperators was the practical reason this very aspect of attentionhad been intensively researched during World War II, whenpsychologists were asked how to keep operators alert. Only thendid attention come under scientific study.Ordinarily we notice something unusual just long enough to besure it poses no threat, or simply to categorize it. Then habituationconserves brain energy by paying no attention to that thing oncewe know it’s safe or familiar. One downside of this brain dynamic:we habituate to anything familiar—the pictures on our walls, thesame dish night after night, even, perhaps, our loved ones.Habituation makes life manageable but a bit dull.The brain habituates using circuitry we share even withreptiles: the brain stem’s reticular activating system (RAS), one ofthe few attention-related circuits known at the time. Inhabituation, cortical circuits inhibit the RAS, keeping this regionquiet when we see the same old thing over and over.In the reverse, sensitization, as we encounter something newor surprising, cortical circuits activate the RAS, which thenengages other brain circuits to process the novel object—a newpiece of art in place of a too-familiar one, say.Elena Antonova, a British neuroscientist who has attended theSRI, found that meditators who had done a three-year retreat inthe Tibetan tradition had less habituation of eye blinks when theyheard loud bursts of noise.3 In other words, their blinks continuedunabated. This replicates (at least conceptually) that study fromJapan where advanced Zen meditators did not habituate torepetitive sounds.The original Zen study was for us seminal. It seemed the Zenbrains could sustain attention when other brains would tune out.This resonated with our own experience at retreats onmindfulness, where we spent hours pushing our attention tonotice every little detail of experience rather than tune out.By zooming in on details of sights, sounds, tastes, andsensations that we otherwise would habituate to, our mindfulnesstransformed the familiar and habitual into the fresh andintriguing. This attention training, we saw, might well enrich ourlives, giving us the choice to reverse habituation by focusing us ona deeply textured here and now, making “the old new again.”Our early view of habituation saw mindfulness as a voluntaryshift from the reflexive tune out. But that was as far as we hadgotten in our thinking—and was already pushing the boundaries ofaccepted scientific thought. Back in the 1970s science sawattention as mostly stimulus-driven, automatic, unconscious, andfrom the “bottom up”—a function of the brain stem, a primitivestructure sitting just above the spinal cord, rather than from a“top-down” cortical area.This view renders attention involuntary. Something happensaround us—a phone rings—and our attention automatically getspulled to the source of that sound. A sound continues to the pointof monotony and we habituate.There was no scientific concept for the volitional control ofattention—despite the fact that psychologists themselves wereusing their volitional attention to write about how no such abilityexisted! In keeping with the scientific standards of the day, thereality of their own experience was simply ignored in favor of whatcould be objectively observed.This truncated view of attention gave only part of the story.Habituation describes one variety of attention over which we haveno conscious control, but higher in our neural circuitry, abovethese bottom-of-the-brain mechanisms, different dynamics apply.Take the emotional centers in the midbrain’s limbic system,where much of the action originates when emotions drive ourattention. When Dan wrote Emotional Intelligence, he drewheavily on research by Richie and other neuroscientists on thethen new discovery of the dance of the amygdala, the brain’s radarfor threat (in the midbrain’s emotion circuits) with prefrontalcircuitry (behind the forehead) the brain’s executive center, whichcan learn, reflect, decide, and pursue long-term goals.When anger or anxiety is triggered, the amygdala drivesprefrontal circuitry; as such disturbing emotions reach their peak,an amygdala hijack paralyzes executive function. But when wetake active control of our attention—as when we meditate—wedeploy this prefrontal circuitry, and the amygdala quiets. Richieand his team have found this quieted amygdala both in long-termvipassana meditators and, with hints of the same pattern—thoughless strong—in people after training in MBSR.4Richie’s scientific career has tracked the locus of attention as itmoved steadily up the brain. In the 1980s he helped foundaffective neuroscience, the field that studies the midbrain’semotional circuitry and how emotions push and pull attention. Bythe 1990s, as contemplative neuroscience began and researchersstarted looking at the brain during meditation, they knew howcircuitry in the prefrontal cortex manages our voluntary attention.This area has today become the brain’s hot spot for meditationresearch; every aspect of attention involves theprefrontal cortexin some way.In humans the prefrontal cortex takes up a larger ratio of thebrain’s top layer, the neocortex, than in any other species, and hasbeen the site of the major evolutionary changes that make ushuman. This neural zone, as we will see, holds the seeds ofawakening to enduring well-being, but it is also entwined withemotional suffering. We can envision wonderful possibilities, andwe also can be disturbed by worrisome thoughts—both signs of theprefrontal cortex at work.While William James wrote about attention as though it wereone single entity, science now tells us the concept refers not just toone ability but to many. Among them:Selective attention, the capacity to focus on one elementand ignore others.Vigilance, maintaining a constant level of attention astime goes on.Allocating attention so we notice small or rapid shifts inwhat we experience.Goal focus, or “cognitive control,” keeping a specific goalor task in mind despite distractions.Meta-awareness, being able to track the quality of one’sown awareness—for example, noticing when your mindwanders or you’ve made a mistake.SELECTING ATTENTIONFrom infancy, Amishi Jha can remember her parents meditatingevery morning using beads to recite mantra, as they had learned intheir native India. But Amishi was not interested in meditation;she went on to become a cognitive neuroscientist trained in therigorous study of attention.While Amishi was on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania,Richie came to lecture. During his talk he never mentionedmeditation, but he did show fMRI images of two brains—one inthe depths of depression, the other happy. Amishi asked him,“How do you get a brain to change from one to the other?”“Meditation,” Richie answered.That got Amishi’s interest, both personally and professionally.She started to meditate, and began to do research on how themethod might impact attention. But she got pushback from hercolleagues, who cautioned her that it was too risky and might notbe of broad scientific interest within the field of psychology.The next year she attended the second meeting of the Mindand Life Summer Research Institute, which provedtransformative. The faculty, graduate students, and postdocs shemet there were a supportive community, who encouraged Amishi.Richie vividly remembers an emotional testimonial Amishigave at this meeting about how meditation was part of her rootculture. While she had felt constrained in pursuing such researchin the academy, she felt she finally found her home with like-minded scientists doing research in this area. Amishi has becomea leader of a new generation of scientists committed tocontemplative neuroscience and its benefits for society.She and her colleagues conducted one of the first rigorousstudies of how meditation impacts attention.5 Her lab, now basedat the University of Miami, found that novices trained in MBSRsignificantly improved in orienting, a component of selectiveattention that directs the mind to target one among the virtuallyinfinite array of sensory inputs.Let’s say you are at a party listening to the music, and tuningout a conversation going on right next to you. If someone were toask you what they had just said, you’d have no idea. But shouldone of them mention your name, you would zero in on thosedulcet sounds as though you had been listening to them rightalong.Known in cognitive science as the “cocktail party effect,” thissudden awareness illustrates part of the design of our brain’sattention systems: we take in more of the stream of informationavailable than we know in conscious awareness. This lets us tuneout irrelevant sounds but still examine them for relevancesomewhere in the mind. And our own name is always relevant.Attention, then, has various channels—the one we consciouslyselect and those we tune out of. Richie’s dissertation researchexamined how meditation might strengthen our ability to focus aswe choose by asking volunteers to pay attention to what they saw(a flashing light) and ignore what they felt (a vibration on thewrist) or vice versa, while he used EEG readings of their visual ortactile cortex to measure the strength of their focus. (His use ofEEG to examine this in humans, by the way, broke new ground—ithad only been done with rats and cats until then.)The meditators among the volunteers showed a modestincrease in what he called “cortical specificity”—more activity inthe appropriate part of the sensory areas of the cortex. So, forexample, when they were paying attention to what they saw, thevisual cortex was more active than the tactile.When we choose to concentrate on visual sensations andignore what we touch, the lights are “signal” and the touch “noise.”When we get distracted, noise drowns the signal; concentrationmeans much more signal than noise. Richie found no increase inthe signal, but there was some reduction in noise—altering theratio. Less noise means more signal.Richie’s dissertation study, like Dan’s, was slightly suggestiveof the effect he was seeking to find. Fast-forward several decadesto far more sophisticated measures of the well-targeted sensoryawareness Richie had tried to demonstrate. A group at MITdeployed MEG—a magnetic EEG measure with a much moreprecise targeting of brain areas than Richie’s old-time EEG hadallowed—with volunteers who had been randomly assigned toeither get an eight-week program in MBSR, or who waited to getthe training until after the experiment was done.6MBSR, remember, includes mindfulness of breath, practicinga systematic scan of sensations throughout your body, attentiveyoga, and moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts and feelings—with the invitation to practice these attention training methodsdaily. After eight weeks those who had gone through the MBSRprogram showed a far better ability to focus on sensations—in thiscase a carefully calibrated tapping on their hand or foot—than theyhad done before starting the MBSR training, as well as better thanthose who were still waiting for MBSR.Conclusion: mindfulness (at least in this form) strengthens thebrain’s ability to focus on one thing and ignore distractions. Theneural circuitry for selective attention, the study concluded, can betrained—contrary to the standard wisdom where attention wasassumed to be hardwired and so, beyond the reach of any trainingattempt.A similar strengthening of selective attention was found invipassana meditators at the Insight Meditation Society who weretested before and after a three-month retreat.7 The retreat offeredwhat amounts to explicit encouragement to be fully attentive, notjust in the daily eight hours of formal sittings but throughout theday as well.Before the retreat, when they paid attention to selective beepsor boops, each at a different tone, their accuracy in spotting thetarget tones was no better than anyone else’s. But after threemonths the retreatants’ selective attention was markedly moreaccurate, showing more than a 20 percent gain.SUSTAINING ATTENTIONZen scholar D. T. Suzuki was a panelist at a symposium heldoutdoors. As he sat behind a table with the other panelists, Suzukiwas perfectly still, his eyes fixed on a spot somewhere in front ofhim, seemingly zoned out in some world of his own. But when asudden gust of wind blew some papers across the table, Suzukialone among the panelists made a lightning grab for them. Hewasn’t zoned out—he was paying keen attention in the Zenfashion.The ability to sustain attention without habituating in Zenmeditators, remember, was one of the meager scientific findingsabout meditation back when we began this scientific quest. ThatZen study, though it had its limitations, spurred us on.Attention flows through a meager bottleneck in the mind, andwe allot that narrow bandwidth parsimoniously.The lion’s sharegoes to what we choose to focus on in the moment. But as we keepour attention on that thing, our focus inevitably wanes, our mindwandering off to other thoughts and the like. Meditation defiesthis mental inertia.A universal goal in meditation of every kind comes down tosustaining attention in a chosen way or to a given target, such asthe breath. Numerous reports, both anecdotal and scientific,support the idea that meditation leads to better sustainedattention, or, to use the technical term, vigilance.But a skeptic might ask, Is it the meditation practice thatenhances attention, or some other factor? That, of course, is whycontrol groups are needed. And to show even more convincinglythat the link between meditation and sustained attention is notmere association, but rather a causal one, requires a longitudinalstudy.That higher bar was met by Clifford Saron and Alan Wallace’sstudy, where volunteers attended a three-month meditationretreat with Wallace as teacher.8 They practiced focusing on theirbreath five hours per day and Saron tested them at the beginningof the retreat, one month into it, at the end, and finally fivemonths later.The meditators improved in vigilance, with the greatest gainsin the first month of retreat. Five months after the retreat ended,each meditator took a follow-up test of vigilance, and,impressively, the improvement gained during retreat was stillstrong.To be sure, the gain was likely maintained by the hour ofpractice daily these meditators reported. Still, this is among thebest direct tests of a meditation-induced altered trait in attentionwe have so far. Of course the evidence would be all the morecompelling if these meditators were to show the same gain fiveyears later, too!WHEN ATTENTION BLINKSWatch a four-year-old intently scan the crowd in a Where’sWaldo? drawing, and see the moment of joy when she finally picksout Waldo in his distinctive red-and-white-striped sweater fromthe confusing crowd. That happy excitement over spotting Waldomarks a key moment in the workings of attention; the brainrewards us for any such victory with a dose of pleasingneurochemicals.For those few moments, research tells us, the nervous systemtakes our focus off-line and relaxes, in what amounts to a shortneural celebration party. If another Waldo were to pop up duringthe party, our attention would be occupied elsewhere. That secondWaldo would go unseen.This moment of temporary blindness is like a blink inattention, a short pause in our mind’s ability to scan oursurroundings (technically, a “refractory period”). During thatblink, the mind’s ability to notice goes blind and attention losessensitivity. A slight change that might otherwise catch our eyegoes by unnoticed. The blink measure reflects “brain efficiency,” inthe sense that not getting too caught up in one thing leaves ourfinite attentional resources available for the next.Speaking practically, the lack of blink reflects a greater abilityto notice small changes—e.g., nonverbal emotional cues of aperson’s shifting emotions telegraphed by fleeting shifts in thesmall muscles around the eyes. Insensitivity to such minor signalscan mean we miss major messages.In one test of the blink, you see a long string of lettersinterspersed with occasional numbers. Each individual letter ornumber is presented very briefly—for 50 milliseconds, which is1/20 of a second, at a breathless rate of ten per second. You arewarned that each string of letters will contain one or two numbers,at random intervals.After each string or fifteen or so, you are asked if you saw anynumbers and what they were. If two numbers were presented in arapid-fire sequence most people tend to miss the second number.That’s the attentional blink.Scientists who study attention had long thought this gap inattention immediately after spotting a long-sought target washardwired, an aspect of the central nervous system that wasinevitable and unchangeable. But then something surprisinghappened.Enter the meditators at the annual three-month vipassanacourse at the Insight Meditation Society, the same ones who did sowell on the test of selective attention. Vipassana meditation, onthe face of it, might lessen the blink, since it cultivates acontinuous nonreactive awareness of whatever arises inexperience, an “open-monitoring” receptive to all that occurs inthe mind. An intensive vipassana course creates something akin tomindfulness on steroids: a nonreactive hyperalertness to all thestuff that arises in one’s mind.Richie’s group measured the attentional blink in vipassanameditators before and after that three-month retreat. After theretreat there was a dramatic reduction, 20 percent, in theattentional blink.9The key neural shift was a drop in response to the first glimpseof a number (they were just noting its presence) so the mindremains calm enough to also notice the second number, even ifvery soon after the first one.That result was a huge surprise to cognitive scientists, who hadbelieved the attentional blink was hardwired and so could not belessened by any kind of training. Once the news was out in sciencecircles, a group of researchers in Germany asked whethermeditation training might offset the universal worsening with ageof the attentional blink, which becomes more frequent and createslonger gaps in awareness as people get older.10 Yes: meditatorswho regularly practiced some form of “open monitoring” (aspacious awareness of whatever comes to mind) reversed theusual escalation of attentional blinks with aging, even doing betterthan another group taken entirely from a younger population.Perhaps, the German researchers speculate, the nonreactiveopen awareness—simply noticing and allowing whatever comesinto the mind “just to be” rather than following a chain of thoughtsabout it—becomes a cognitive skill that transfers over toregistering a target like the letters and numbers on the blink testwithout getting caught up in it. That leaves their attention readyfor the next target in the sequence—a more efficient way towitness the passing world.Once the attentional blink had been shown to be reversible,Dutch scientists wondered, What’s the minimum training that stilllessens the blink? They taught people who had never meditatedbefore how to monitor their mind, using a version ofmindfulness.11 The training sessions lasted just seventeenminutes, after which the volunteers were tested on the attentionalblink. They blinked less than a comparison group, who had beentaught a focusing meditation that had no effect on this mentalskill.THE MULTITASKING MYTHWe all suffer from the digital-age version of life’s “fullcatastrophe”: incoming emails, pressing texts, phone messages,and more, storming in all at once—not to mention the Facebookposts, Instagrams, and all such urgent memos from our personaluniverse of social media. Given the ubiquity of smartphones andsuch devices, people today seem to take in far more informationthan they did before the digital age.Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions,cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescientobservation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealthof information means a poverty of attention.”Then, too, there are the ways our social connections suffer. Didyou ever have the impulse to tell a child to put down her phoneand look in the eyes of the person she is talking to? The need forsuch advice is becoming increasingly common as digitaldistractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills likeempathy and social presence.The symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside what weare doing to connect, lies in the respect, care, even love itindicates. A lack of attention to those around us sends a messageof indifference.Such social norms for attention to the people weare with have silently, inexorably shifted.Yet we are largely impervious to these effects. Many denizensof the digital world, for instance, pride themselves on being able tomultitask, carrying on with their essential work even as they grazeamong all the other incoming channels of what’s-up. Butcompelling research at Stanford University has shown that thisvery idea is a myth—the brain does not “multitask” but ratherswitches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all thosefunny videos, friends’ updates, urgent texts . . . ).12Attention tasks don’t really go on in parallel, as “multitasking”implies; instead they demand rapid switching from one thing tothe other. And following every such switch, when our attentionreturns to the original task, its strength has been appreciablydiminished. It can take several minutes to ramp up once again tofull concentration.The harm spills over into the rest of life. For one, the inabilityto filter out the noise (all those distractions) from the signal (whatyou meant to focus on) creates a confusion about what’simportant, and so a drop in our ability to retain what matters.Heavy multitaskers, the Stanford group discovered, are moreeasily distracted in general. And when multitaskers do try to focuson that one thing they have to get done, their brains activate manymore areas than just those relevant to the task at hand—a neuralindicator of distraction.Even the ability to multitask efficiently suffers. As the lateClifford Nass, one of the researchers, put it, multitaskers are“suckers for irrelevancy,” which hampers not just concentrationbut also analytic understanding and empathy.13COGNITIVE CONTROLCognitive control, on the other hand, lets us focus on a specificgoal or task and keep it in mind while resisting distractions, thevery abilities multitasking harms. Such steely focus is essential injobs like air traffic control—where screens can be filled withdistractions from the controller’s main focus, a given incomingairplane—or just in getting through your daily to-do list.The good news for multitaskers: cognitive control can bestrengthened. Undergrads volunteered to try ten-minute sessionsof either focusing on counting their breath or an apt comparisontask: browsing Huffington Post, Snapchat, or BuzzFeed.14Just three ten-minute sessions of breath counting was enoughto appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests.And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who didmore poorly on those tests initially.If multitasking results in flabby attention, a concentrationworkout like counting breaths offers a way to tone up, at least inthe short term. But there was no indication that the upward bumpin attention would last—the improvement came immediately afterthe “workout,” and so registers on our radar as a state effect, not alasting trait. The brain’s attention circuitry needs more sustainedefforts to create a stable trait, as we will see.Still, even beginners in meditation can sharpen their attentionskills, with some surprising benefits. For instance, researchers atthe University of California at Santa Barbara gave volunteers aneight-minute instruction of mindfulness of their breath, and foundthat this short focusing session (compared to reading a newspaperor just relaxing) lessened how much their mind wanderedafterward.15While that finding is of interest, the follow-up was even morecompelling. The same researchers gave volunteers a two-weekcourse in mindfulness of breathing, as well as of daily activitieslike eating, for a total of six hours, plus ten-minute boostersessions at home daily.16 The active control group studiednutrition for the same amount of time. Again, mindfulnessimproved concentration and lessened mind-wandering.A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory—theholding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-termmemory. Attention is crucial for working memory; if we aren’tpaying attention, those digits won’t register in the first place.This training in mindfulness occurred while the students in thestudy were still in school. The boost to their attention and workingmemory may help account for the even bigger surprise:mindfulness upped their scores by more than 30 percent on theGRE, the entrance exam for grad school. Students, take note.Another way cognitive control helps us is in managing ourimpulses, technically known as “response inhibition.” As we sawin chapter five, “A Mind Undisturbed,” in Cliff Saron’s study thetraining upped a meditator’s ability to inhibit impulse over thecourse of three months and, impressively, stayed strong in a five-month follow-up.17 And better impulse inhibition went along witha self-reported uptick in emotional well-being.META-AWARENESSWhen we did our first vipassana courses in India, we foundourselves immersed hour after hour in noting the comings andgoings of our own mind, cultivating stability by simply noticingrather than following where those thoughts, impulses, desires, orfeelings would have us go. This intensive attention to themovements of our mind boils down to pure meta-awareness.In meta-awareness it does not matter what we focus ourattention on, but rather that we recognize awareness itself. Usuallywhat we perceive is a figure, with awareness in the background.Meta-awareness switches figure and ground in our perception, soawareness itself becomes foremost.Such awareness of awareness itself lets us monitor our mindwithout being swept away by the thoughts and feelings we arenoticing. “That which is aware of sadness is not sad,” observesphilosopher Sam Harris. “That which is aware of fear is notfearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I’m asconfused as anyone else.”18Scientists refer to brain activity reflecting our conscious mindand its mental doings as “top-down.” “Bottom-up” refers to whatgoes on in the mind largely outside awareness, in what technicallyis the “cognitive unconscious.” A surprising amount of what wethink is from the top down is actually from the bottom up. Weseem to impose a top-down gloss on our awareness, where thethin slice of the cognitive unconscious that comes to our attentioncreates the illusion of being the entirety of mind.19We remain unaware of the much vaster mental machinery ofbottom-up processes—at least in the conventional awareness ofour everyday life. Meta-awareness lets us see a larger swath ofbottom-up operations.Meta-awareness allows us to track our attention itself—noticing, for example, when our mind has wandered off fromsomething we want to focus on. This ability to monitor the mindwithout getting swept away introduces a crucial choice point whenwe find our mind has wandered: we can bring our focus back tothe task at hand. This simple mental skill undergirds a huge rangeof what makes us effective in the world—everything from learningto realizing we’ve had a creative insight to seeing a project throughto its end.There are two varieties of experience: the “mere awareness” ofa thing, which our ordinary consciousness gives us, versusknowing you are aware of that thing—recognizing awareness itself,without judgment or other emotional reactions. For example, wetypically watch an engrossing movie so swept away by the plot thatwe’ve lost awareness of being in a theater with all itssurroundings. But we also can watch a movie attentively whilemaintaining a background awareness of being in the theaterwatching a movie. This background awareness doesn’t diminishour appreciation and involvement in the movie—it’s simply adifferent mode of awareness.At the movies the person next to you with a bag of popcorncould be making crunching noises that you tune out but whichnevertheless register in your brain. DuringFor both sports and meditation, the end resultsvary depending on what you actually do.Some practical advice: for those about to start a meditationpractice, or who have been grazing among several, keep in mindthat as with gaining skill in a given sport, finding a meditationpractice that appeals to you and sticking with it will have thegreatest benefits. Just find one to try, decide on the amount oftime each day you can realistically practice daily—even as short asa few minutes—try it for a month, and see how you feel after thosethirty days.Just as regular workouts give you better physical fitness, mostany type of meditation will enhance mental fitness to some degree.As we’ll see, the specific benefits from one or another type getstronger the more total hours of practice you put in.A CAUTIONARY TALESwami X, as we’ll call him, was at the tip of the wave of meditationteachers from Asia who swarmed to America in the mid-1970s,during our Harvard days. The swami reached out to us saying hewas eager to have his yogic prowess studied by scientists atHarvard who could confirm his remarkable abilities.It was the height of excitement about a then new technology,biofeedback, which fed people instant information about theirphysiology—blood pressure, for instance—which otherwise wasbeyond their conscious control. With that new incoming signal,people were able to nudge their body’s operations in healthierdirections. Swami X claimed he had such control without the needfor feedback.Happy to stumble on a seemingly accomplished subject forresearch, we were able to finagle the use of a physiology lab atHarvard Medical School’s Massachusetts Mental Health Center.4But come the day of testing the swami’s prowess, when weasked him to lower his blood pressure, he raised it. When asked toraise it, he lowered it. And when we told him this, the swamiberated us for serving him “toxic tea” that supposedly sabotagedhis gifts.Our physiological tracings revealed he could do none of themental feats he had boasted about. He did, however, manage toput his heart into atrial fibrillation—a high-risk biotalent—with amethod he called “dog samadhi,” a name that mystifies us to thisday.From time to time the swami disappeared into the men’s roomto smoke a bidi (these cheap cigarettes, a few flakes of tobaccowrapped in a plant leaf, are popular throughout India). A telegramfrom friends in India soon after revealed that the “swami” wasactually the former manager of a shoe factory who had abandonedhis wife and two children and come to America to make hisfortune.No doubt Swami X was seeking a marketing edge to attractdisciples. In his subsequent appearances he made sure to mentionthat “scientists at Harvard” had studied his meditative prowess.This was an early harbinger of what has become a bountifulharvest of data refried into sales hype.With such cautionary incidents in mind, we bring open butskeptical minds—the scientist’s mind-set—to the current wave ofmeditation research. For the most part we view with satisfactionthe rise of the mindfulness movement and its rapidly growingreach in schools, business, and our private lives—the wideapproach. But we bemoan how the data all too often is distorted orexaggerated when science gets used as a sales hook.The mix of meditation and monetizing has a sorry track recordas a recipe for hucksterism, disappointment, even scandal. All toooften, gross misrepresentations, questionable claims, ordistortions of scientific studies are used to sell meditation. Abusiness website, for instance, features a blog post called “HowMindfulness Fixes Your Brain, Reduces Stress, and BoostsPerformance.” Are these claims justified by solid scientificfindings? Yes and no—though the “no” too easily gets overlooked.Among the iffy findings gone viral with enthusiastic claims:that meditation thickens the brain’s executive center, theprefrontal cortex, while shrinking the amygdala, the trigger for ourfreeze-fight-or-flight response; that meditation shifts our brain’sset point for emotions into a more positive range; that meditationslows aging; and that meditation can be used to treat diseasesranging from diabetes to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.On closer look, each of the studies on which these claims arebased has problems with the methods used; they need moretesting and corroboration to make firm claims. Such findings maywell stand up to further scrutiny—or maybe not.The research reporting amygdala shrinkage, for instance, useda method to estimate amygdala volume that may not be veryaccurate. And one widely cited study describing slower aging useda very complex treatment that included some meditation but wasmixed with a special diet and intensive exercise as well; the impactof meditation per se was impossible to decipher.Still, social media are rife with such claims—and hyperbolic adcopy can be enticing. So we offer a clear-eyed view based on hardscience, sifting out results that are not nearly as compelling as theclaims made for them.Even well-meaning proponents have little guidance indistinguishing between what’s sound and what’s questionable—orjust sheer nonsense. Given the rising tide of enthusiasm, our moresober-minded take comes not a moment too soon.A note to readers. The first three chapters cover our initialforays into meditation, and the scientific hunch that motivated ourquest. Chapters four through twelve narrate the scientific journey,with each chapter devoted to a particular topic like attention orcompassion; each of these has an “In a Nutshell” summary at theend for those who are more interested in what we found than howwe got there. In chapters eleven and twelve we arrive at our long-sought destination, sharing the remarkable findings on the mostadvanced meditators ever studied. In chapter thirteen, “AlteringTraits,” we lay out the benefits of meditation at three levels:beginner, long-term, and “Olympic.” In our final chapter wespeculate on what the future might bring, and how these findingsmight be of greater benefit not just to each of us individually butto society.THE ACCELERATIONAs early as the 1830s, Thoreau and Emerson, along with theirfellow American Transcendentalists, flirted with these Easterninner arts. They were spurred by the first English-languagetranslations of ancient spiritual texts from Asia—but had noinstruction in the practices that supported those texts. Almost acentury later, Sigmund Freud advised psychoanalysts to adopt an“even-hovering attention” while listening to their clients—butagain, offered no method.The West’s more serious engagement took hold mere decadesago, as teachers from the East arrived, and as a generation ofWesterners traveled to study meditation in Asia, some returningas teachers. These forays paved the way for the currentacceleration of the wide path, along with fresh possibilities forthose few who choose to pursue the deep way.Publication Count for Scientific Studies on Meditation or Mindfulness, 1970–2016In the 1970s, when we began publishing our research onmeditation, there were just a handful of scientific articles on thetopic. At last count there numbered 6,838 such articles, with anotable acceleration of late. For 2014 the annual number was 925,in 2015 the total was 1,098, and in 2016 there were 1,113 suchpublications in the English language scientific literature.5PRIMING THE FIELDIt was April 2001, on the top floor of the Fluno Center on thecampus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and we wereconvening with the Dalai Lama for an afternoon of scientificdialogue on meditation research findings. Missing from the roomwas Francisco Varela, a Chilean-born neuroscientist and head of acognitive neuroscience laboratory at the French National Centerfor Scientific Research in Paris.such unconsciousmental processing, activity lessens in a key cortical area, thedorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC for short. As you becomemore aware of being aware, the DLPFC becomes more active.Consider unconscious bias, the prejudices we hold but do notbelieve we have at all (as mentioned in chapter six, “Primed forLove”). Meditation can both enhance the function of the DLPFCand lessen unconscious bias.20Cognitive psychologists test meta-awareness by giving peoplemental tasks so challenging that errors are inevitable, and thentracking the number of such errors—and whether the personnotices there might have been an error (that’s the meta-awarenessangle). These tasks are purposely devilish, designed and calibratedto ensure that whoever takes it will make a certain percentage ofmistakes, and, what’s more, that their confidence in theirresponses will vary.Imagine, for instance, having 160 words whiz by in successionfor 1.5 seconds each. Then you see another set of 320 words, halfof which you’ve seen before in that zippy presentation. You have topress one of two buttons to tell if you think the word you see in thesecond set was in the previous list, or not. Then you rate yourconfidence in your accuracy for each word, a metric for meta-awareness to the degree you both have confidence in and make thecorrect response.Psychologists at UC–Santa Barbara used such a mentalchallenge with people learning mindfulness for the first time, aswell as a group who had a course in nutrition.21 Meta-awarenessimproved in the meditation group, but not a whit in those takingthe nutrition class.WILL IT LAST?Amishi Jha’s lab tested the effect of an intensive mindfulnessretreat where people meditated for more than eight hours eachday for a month.22 The retreat boosted participants’ “alerting,” avigilant state of readiness to respond to whatever you encounter.But although in a previous study she had found an improvementin orienting with beginners in a brief course of mindfulness,surprisingly, these retreat participants showed no such boost.This nonfinding represents important data if we are to get afull picture of how meditation does and does not matter. It helpsus get a portrait of how various aspects of attention change—or donot—with different types of meditation, and at differing levels.Some changes might occur right away, while others takelonger: while orienting may budge initially and then stall, alertingseems to improve with practice. And, we suspect, meditationsustained over time might be needed to maintain such shifts inattention, lest they fade.About the time when Richie was doing his Harvard researchon signal-to-noise shifts in meditators, cognitive scientists such asAnne Treisman and Michael Posner pointed out that “attention”represents too gross a concept. Instead, they argued, we shouldlook at various subtypes of attention, and the neural circuitry eachinvolves. Meditation, the findings now show, seems to enhancemany of these subtypes, though we don’t yet have the full picture.Amishi’s results tell us that picture will be nuanced.A word of caution: while some aspects of attention improveafter just a few hours (or, it seems, minutes!) of practice, this byno means indicates those improvements will last. We’re skepticalthat quickie, one-time interventions matter much after anytemporary improvements fade. There is no evidence, for instance,that the erasure of the attentional blink induced by seventeenminutes of mindfulness will make a detectable difference merehours later, after that state wanes. The same holds for those ten-minute mindfulness sessions that reversed the erosion of focusfrom multitasking. We suspect that unless you continue thepractice every day, multitasking will still weaken your focus.Our hunch would be that pushing a neural system likeattention in a lasting way requires not just these short trainingsand continued daily practice, but also intensive booster sessions,as was the case with those who were at the shamatha retreat andthen were tested five months later in Cliff Saron’s study.Otherwise the brain’s wiring will regress to its previous status: alife of distraction punctuated with periods of concentration.Even so, it’s encouraging that such short doses of meditationimprove attention. The fact that these improvements come withsuch rapidity confirms William James’s conjecture that sharperattention can be cultivated. Today there are meditation centers inCambridge no more than a fifteen-minute walk from whereWilliam James once lived. Had they been there during his lifetime,and had William James practiced at one, he would no doubt havefound his missing education par excellence.IN A NUTSHELLMeditation, at its root, retrains attention, and different types boostvarying aspects of attention. MBSR strengthens selectiveattention, while long-term vipassana practice enhances this evenmore. Even five months after the three-month shamatha retreat,meditators had enhanced vigilance, the ability to sustain theirattention. And the attentional blink lessened greatly after threemonths on a vipassana retreat—but the beginnings of thislessening also showed up after just seventeen minutes ofmindfulness in beginners, no doubt a transitory state for thenewcomers, and a more lasting trait for those retreatants. Thatsame practice-makes-perfect maxim likely applies to several otherquickie meditations: just ten minutes of mindfulness overcame thedamage to concentration from multitasking—at least in the shortterm; only eight minutes of mindfulness lessened mind-wanderingfor a while. About ten hours of mindfulness over a two-weekperiod strengthened attention and working memory—and led tosubstantial improved scores on the graduate school entranceexam. While meditation boosts many aspects of attention, theseare short-term gains; more lasting benefits no doubt requireongoing practice.B8Lightness of Beingack to Richie on his retreat in Dalhousie with S. N. Goenka.A revelation came to Richie on the seventh day, during theHour of Stillness, which begins with a vow not to make a singlevoluntary movement, no matter how excruciating your discomfort.Almost from the start of that endless hour Richie’s usual achein his right knee, now intensified by the no-moving vow, wentfrom pulsating jolts to torture. But then, just as the pain reachedthe unbearable point, something changed: his awareness.Suddenly, what had been pain disappeared into a collection ofsensations—tingling, burning, pressure—but his knee no longerhurt. The “pain” dissolved into waves of vibrations without a traceof emotional reactivity.Focusing on just the sensations meant completely reappraisingthe nature of hurting: instead of fixating on the pain, the verynotion of pain deconstructed into raw sensations. What wentmissing was just as critical: the psychological resistance to, andnegative feelings about, those sensations.The pain had not vanished, but Richie had changed hisrelationship to it. There was just raw sensation—not my pain,along with the usual stream of angst-ridden thoughts.Though while we sit we ordinarily are oblivious to our subtleshifts in posture and the like, these small movements relieve stressthat’s building in our body. When you don’t move a muscle, thatstress can build into excruciating pain. And if, like Richie, you arescanning those sensations, a remarkable shift in your relationshipto your own experience can occur where the feeling of “pain” meltsaway into a mélange of physical sensations.In that hour Richie, with his science background, realized inhis most personal reality that what we label as “pain” is a joiningtogether of myriad constituent somatic sensations from which thelabel arises. With his newly altered perception, “pain” became justan idea, a mentallabel that puts a conceptual veneer over whatarises from a motley coincidence of sensations, perceptions, andresistant thoughts.This was a vivid taste for Richie of how much mental activity isgoing on in our mind “under the hood,” and about which we areoblivious. He understood that our experience is not based on thedirect apperception of what is happening, but to a great extentupon our expectations and projections, the habitual thoughts andreactions that we have learned to make in response, and animpenetrable sea of neural processes. We live in a world ourminds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details ofwhat is happening.This led Richie to a scientific insight: that consciousnessoperates as an integrator, gluing together a vast amount ofelementary mental processes, most of which we are oblivious to.We know their eventual product—my pain—but typically have noawareness of the countless elements that combine into thatperception.While that understanding has become a given in cognitivescience today, back in the days of the Dalhousie retreat there wasno such understanding. Richie had no inkling apart from his owntransformation in awareness.During the first days of the retreat Richie would shift hisposition now and then to relieve the discomfort in his knees orback. But after that no-moving perceptual breakthrough, Richiecould be still as a rock during marathon sessions of up to threehours or longer. With this radical inner shift, Richie felt a sensethat he could sit through anything.Richie saw that if we actually paid attention in the right way tothe nature of our experience, it would change dramatically. TheHour of Stillness shows that every waking moment of our lives, weconstruct our experience around a narrative where we are the star—and that we can deconstruct that story we center on ourselves byapplying the right kind of awareness.HOW OUR BRAIN CONSTRUCTS OURSELFMarcus Raichle was surprised—and troubled. Raichle, aneuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, had beendoing pioneering brain studies to identify which neural areas wereactive during various mental activities. To do this kind of researchback in 2001, Raichle used a strategy common at the time:comparing the active task to a baseline where the participant wasdoing “nothing.” What troubled him: during highly demandingcognitive tasks—like counting backward by 13s from the number1,475—there were a set of brain regions that deactivated.The standard assumption was that such an effortful mental jobwould always increase activation in brain areas. But thedeactivation Raichle found was a systematic pattern, one thataccompanies the shift from the resting baseline of doing “nothing”to doing any kind of mental task.In other words, while we’re doing nothing there are brainregions that are highly activated, even more active than thoseengaged during a difficult cognitive task. While we are working ata mental challenge like tricky subtraction, these brain regions goquiet.His observation confirmed a mystifying fact that had floatedaround the world of brain science for a while: that although thebrain makes up only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it consumesabout 20 percent of the body’s metabolic energy as measured byits oxygen usage, and that rate of oxygen consumption remainsmore or less constant no matter what we are doing—includingnothing at all. The brain, it seems, stays just as busy when we arerelaxed as when we are under some mental strain.So, where are all those neurons, chatting back and forth whilewe do nothing in particular? Raichle identified a swath of areas,mainly the mPFC (short for midline of the prefrontal cortex) andthe PCC (postcingulate cortex), a node connecting to the limbicsystem. He dubbed this circuitry the brain’s “default modenetwork.”1While the brain engages in an active task, whether math ormeditating, the default areas calm down as those essential for thattask gear up, and ramp up again when that mental task finishes.This solved the problem of how the brain could maintain itsactivity level while “nothing” was going on.When scientists asked people during these periods of “doingnothing” what was going on in their minds, not surprisingly, it wasnot nothing! They typically reported that their minds werewandering; most often, this mind-wandering was focused on theself—How am I doing in this experiment? I wonder what they arelearning about me; I need to reply to Joe’s phone message—allreflecting mental activity focused on “I” and “me.”2In short, our mind wanders mostly to something aboutourselves—my thoughts, my emotions, my relationships, wholiked my new post on my Facebook page—all the minutiae of ourlife story. By framing every event in how it impacts ourselves, thedefault mode makes each of us the center of the universe as weknow it. Those reveries knit together our sense of “self” from thefragmentary memories, hopes, dreams, plans, and so on thatcenter on I, me, and mine. Our default mode continually rescriptsa movie where each of us stars, replaying particularly favorite orupsetting scenes over and over.The default mode turns on while we chill out, not doinganything that requires focus and effort; it blossoms during themind’s downtime. Conversely, as we focus on some challenge, likegrappling with what’s happened to your Wi-Fi signal, the defaultmode quiets.With nothing much else to capture our attention, our mindwanders, very often to what’s troubling us—a root cause ofeveryday angst. For this reason, when Harvard researchers askedthousands of people to report their mental focus and mood atrandom points through the day, their conclusion was that “awandering mind is an unhappy mind.”This self-system mulls over our life—especially the problemswe face, the difficulties in our relationships, our worries andanxieties. Because the self ruminates on what’s bothering us, wefeel relieved when we can turn it off. One of the great appeals ofhigh-risk sports like rock climbing seems to be just that—thedanger of the sport demands a full focus on where to put yourhand or foot next. More mundane worries take backstage in themind.The same applies to “flow,” the state where people perform attheir best. Paying full attention to what’s at hand, flow researchtells us, rates high on the list of what puts us into—and sustains—ajoyous state. The self, in its form as mind-wandering, becomes adistraction, suppressed for the time being.Managing attention, as we saw in the previous chapter, is anessential ingredient of every variety of meditation. When webecome lost in thoughts during meditation, we’ve fallen into thedefault mode and its wandering mind.A basic instruction in almost all forms of meditation urges usto notice when our mind has wandered and then return our focusto the chosen target, say, a mantra or our breathing. This momenthas universal familiarity on contemplative paths.This simple mental move has a neural correlate: activating theconnection between the dorsolateral PFC and the default mode—aconnection found to be stronger in long-term meditators than inbeginners.3 The stronger this connection, the more likelyregulatory circuits in the prefrontal cortex inhibit the defaultareas, quieting the monkey mind—the incessant self-focusedchatter that so often fills our minds when nothing else is pressing.A Sufi poem hints at this shift, speaking of the shift from “athousand thoughts” to just one: “There is no god but God.”4DECONSTRUCTING THE SELFAs fifth-century Indian sage Vasubhandu observed, “So long asyou grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.”While most ways to relieve us from the burden of self aretemporary, meditation paths aim to make that relief an ongoingfact of life—a lasting trait. Traditional meditative pathscontrastour everyday mental states—that stream of thoughts, many ladenwith angst, or to-do lists that never end—with a state of being freeof these weights. And each path, in its particular terms, seeslightening our sense of self as the key to such inner freedom.When the pain in Richie’s knee shifted from excruciating tosuddenly bearable, there was a parallel shift in how he identifiedwith it. It was no longer “his” pain; the sense of “mine” hadevaporated.Richie’s hour of utter stillness offers a glimpse of how ourordinary “self” can reduce to an optical illusion of the mind. Asthis keen observation gains strength, at some point our very senseof a solid self breaks down. This shift in how we experienceourselves—our pain and all that we attach to it—points to one ofthe main goals of all spiritual practice: lightening the system thatbuilds our feelings of I, me, and mine.The Buddha, in telling of this very insight, likened the self to achariot, a concept that arises when wheels, platform, yoke, and soon are put together—but which does not exist save as these partsin combination. To update the metaphor, there is no “car” in thetires, nor the dashboard or the steel shell of its body—but put allthese together with the multitude of other parts, and what wethink of as a car manifests.In the same way, cognitive science tells us, our sense of selfemerges as a property of the many neural subsystems that threadtogether, among other streams, our memories, our perceptions,our emotions, and our thoughts. Any of those alone would beinsufficient for a full sense of our self, but in the right combinationwe have the cozy feel of our unique being.Meditative traditions of all kinds share one goal: letting go ofthe constant grasping—the “stickiness” of our thoughts, emotions,and impulses—that guides us through our days and lives.Technically called “dereification,” this key insight has themeditator realize that thoughts, feelings, and impulses arepassing, insubstantial mental events. With this insight we don’thave to believe our thoughts; instead of following them downsome track, we can let them go.As Dōgen, founder of the Soto school of Zen, instructed, “If athought arises, take note of it and then dismiss it. When you forgetall attachments steadfastly, you will naturally become zazen itself.”Many other traditions see lightening the self as the path toinner freedom. We’ve often heard the Dalai Lama talk about“emptiness,” by which he means the sense in which our “self’—andall seeming objects in our world—actually emerge from thecombination of their components.Some Christian theologians use the term kenosis for theemptying of self, where our own wants and needs diminish whileour openness to the needs of others grows into compassion. As aSufi teacher put it, “When occupied with self, you are separatedfrom God. The way to God is but one step; the step out ofyourself.”5Such a step out of the self, technically speaking, suggestsweakening activation of the default circuitry that binds togetherthe mosaic of memories, thoughts, impulses, and other semi-independent mental processes into the cohesive sense of “me” and“mine.”The stuff of our lives becomes less “sticky” as we shift into aless attached relationship toward all that. At the higher reaches ofpractice, mind training lessens the activity of our “self.” “Me” and“mine” lose their self-hypnotic power; our concerns become lessburdensome. Though the bill still must be paid, the lighter our“selfing,” the less we anguish about that bill and the freer we feel.We still find a way to pay it, but without the extra load ofemotional baggage.While almost every contemplative path holds lightness ofbeing as a primary aim, paradoxically, very little scientificresearch speaks to this goal. Our reading of the meager studiesdone so far suggests there may be three stages in how meditationleads to greater selflessness. Each of these stages uses a differentneural strategy to quiet the brain’s default mode, and so free us abit from the grip of the self.THE DATADavid Creswell, now at Carnegie Mellon University, was anotheryoung scientist whose interest in meditation was nurtured byattending the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute. To assessthe early stage, found among meditation novices, Creswell’s groupmeasured brain activity in people who volunteered for a three-dayintensive course in mindfulness.6 The volunteers had nevermeditated before, but in this mindfulness course they learned thatif you are lost in some personal melodrama (a favorite theme ofthe default mode), you can voluntarily drop it—you can name it, orshift your attention to watching your breath or to bare awarenessof the present moment. All of these are active interventions,efforts to quiet the monkey mind.Such efforts heighten activity in the dorsolateral prefrontalarea, a key circuit for managing the default mode. As we’ve seen,this area springs into action anytime we intentionally attempt toquiet our agitated mind—for instance, when we try to think ofsomething more pleasant than some upsetting encounter thatkeeps running over and over in our mind.Three days of practicing these mindfulness methods led toincreased connections between this control circuitry and thedefault zone’s PCC, a primary region for self-focused thought.Novices in meditation, this suggests, keep their mind fromwandering by activating neural wiring that can quiet the defaultarea.But with more experienced meditators, the next phase ofdownscaling the self adds lessened activity in key sections of thedefault mode—a loosening of the mechanics of self—while theheightened connections with control areas continue. A case inpoint: researchers led by Judson Brewer, then at Yale University,(and who has been on the faculty at the SRI) explored braincorrelates of mindfulness practice, comparing highly experiencedmeditators (averaging around 10,500 lifetime hours) withnovices.7During the meditation practice, all those tested wereencouraged to distinguish between simply noting the identity ofan experience (itching is occurring, say) and identifying with it (Iitch)—and then to let go. This distinction seems a crucial step inloosening the self, by activating meta-awareness—a “minimal self”that can simply notice the itch rather than bring it into our storyline, my itch.As mentioned, when we are watching a movie and are lost inits story, but then notice that we are in a movie theater watching afilm, we have stepped out of the movie’s world into a large framethat includes the movie but goes beyond. Having such meta-awareness allows us to monitor our thoughts, feelings, andactions; to manage them as we like; and to inquire into theirdynamics.Our sense of self gets woven in an ongoing personal narrativethat threads together disparate parts of our life into a coherentstory line. This narrator resides mainly in the default mode butbrings together inputs from a broad range of brain areas that inthemselves have nothing to do with the sense of self.The seasoned meditators in the Brewer study had the samestrong connection between the control circuit and the defaultmode seen in beginners, but in addition had less activation withinthe default mode areas themselves. This was particularly truewhen they practiced loving-kindness meditation—a corroborationof the maxim that the more we think of the well-being of others,the less we focus on ourselves.8Intriguingly, the long-term meditators seemed to have roughlythe same lessened connectivity in the default mode circuitry whilethey just rested before the test as they displayed duringmindfulness. That’s a likely trait effect and a good sign: thesemeditators intentionally train to be as mindful in their daily livesas during meditation sessions. The same lessened connectivitycompared to nonmeditators was found by brain researchers inIsrael studying long-term mindfulness meditators, who had onaverage around 9,000 hours of practice under their belts.9Further indirect evidence for this change in long-termmeditators comes from a study at Emory University of seasonedZen meditators (three years–plus practice, but lifetime hoursunknown) who, compared to controls, seemed to show less activityin parts of the default area while focusing on their breath duringbrain scans. The bigger this effect, the better they did on a test ofsustained attention outside the scanner, suggesting a lasting dropin mind-wandering.10 Finally, a small but suggestive study of Zenmeditators at the University of Montreal found lessened defaultarea connectivity while just resting among Zen meditators (withan average 1,700 hours of practice) compared to a group ofvolunteers trained in zazen for just one week.11There’s a theory that what captures our attention signifies anattachment, and the more attached we are, the more often we’ll beso captivated. In an experiment testing this premise, a group ofvolunteers and one of seasoned meditators (4,200 hours) weretold they would get money whenever they recognized certaingeometric shapes within an array.12 That was, in a sense, thecreation of a mini-attachment. Then, in a later phase, when theywere told to simply focus on their breath and ignore those shapes,the meditators were less distracted by them than were the controlgroup.Along these lines, Richie’s group found that meditators whohad an average 7,500 lifetime hours, compared to people theirown age, had decreased gray matter volume in a key region: thenucleus accumbens.13 This was the only brain region showing adifference in brain structure compared to age-matched controls. Asmaller nucleus accumbens diminishes connectivity between theseself-related regions and the other neural modules that ordinarilyorchestrate to create our sense of self.This is a bit of a surprise: the nucleus accumbens plays a largerole in the brain’s “reward” circuits, a source of pleasurablefeelings in life. But this is also a key area for “stickiness,” ouremotional attachments, and addictions—in short, what ensnaresus. This decrease in gray-matter volume in the nucleus accumbensmay reflect a diminished attachment in the meditators,particularly to the narrative self.So, does this change leave meditators cold and indifferent?The Dalai Lama and other highly seasoned practitioners come tomind—like those who came to Richie’s lab, most of whom tendtoward joyousness and warmth.Meditation texts describe long-term practitioners achieving anongoing compassion and bliss, but with “emptiness,” in the senseof no attachment. For instance, Hindu contemplative pathsdescribe vairagya, a later stage of practice where attachmentsdrop away—renunciation, in this sense, happens spontaneouslyrather than through force of will. And with this shift emerges analternate source of delight in sheer being.14Could this indicate a neural circuit that brings a quietenjoyment, even as our nucleus accumbens–based attachmentswane? We will see just such a possibility in chapter twelve,“Hidden Treasure,” from brain studies of advanced yogis.Arthur Zajonc, the second president of the Mind and LifeInstitute, and a quantum physicist and philosopher to boot, oncesaid that if we let go of grasping, “we become more open to ourown experience, and to other people. That openness—a form oflove—lets us more easily approach other people’s suffering.”“Great souls,” he added, “seem to embody the ability to engagesuffering and handle it without collapse. Letting go of grasping isliberating, creating a moral axis for action and compassion.”15A THIEF IN AN EMPTY HOUSEAncient meditation manuals say letting go of these thoughts is, atfirst, like a snake uncoiling itself; it takes some effort. Later,though, whatever thoughts come to mind are like a thief enteringan empty house: there’s nothing to do, so they just leave.This segue from at first making an effort to later effortlessnessseems a universal, though little-known, theme in meditationpaths. Common sense tells us that learning any new skill takeshard work at first and becomes progressively easier with practice.Cognitive neuroscience tells us this shift to effortlessness marks aneural transition in habit mastery: the prefrontal areas no longermake an effort to do the work, as the basal ganglia lower in thebrain can take over—a neural mode that marks effortlessness.Effortful practice at the early stages of meditation activatesprefrontal regulatory circuits. However, the later shift to effortlesspractice might go along with a different dynamic: lessenedconnectivity among the various nodes of the default circuitry, andlessened activity in the PCC as effortful control is no longerneeded—the mind at this stage is truly beginning to settle and theself-narrative is much less sticky.That was found in another study by Judson Brewer, whereseasoned meditators reported their experience in the moment,allowing scientists to see what brain activity correlated with it.When the meditators showed decreased activity in their PCC, theyreported feelings like “undistracted awareness” and “effortlessdoing.”16In the scientific study of any skill that people practice, fromdentistry to chess, when it comes to sorting out the duffers fromthe pros, lifetime hours of practice are gold. A pattern of higheffort at the start segueing into less effort along with moreproficiency in a task shows up in experts as diverse as swimmersand violinists. And as we’ve seen here, the brains of those with themost hours of meditation showed little effort in keeping theirfocus one-pointed, even despite compelling distractions, whilethose with fewer lifetime hours put in more effort. And at the verystart, beginners showed an increase in biological markers ofmental effort.17The rule of thumb: the brain of a novice works hard while thatof the expert expends little energy. As we master any activity, thebrain conserves its fuel by putting that action on “automatic”;cuing up that activity shifts from top-of-the-brain circuits to thebasal ganglia far below the neocortex. We’ve all accomplished thehard-at-first to no-sweat transition when we learned to walk—andas we’ve mastered every other habit since. What at first demandsattention and exertion becomes automatic and effortless.At the third and final stage of letting go of self-referencing, weconjecture, the control circuitry’s role drops away, as the mainaction shifts to looser connectivity in the default mode, the homeof the self. Brewer’s group found such a decrease.With a spontaneous shift to effortlessness comes a change inthe relationship to the self: it’s not so “sticky” anymore. The samesorts of thoughts can arise in your mind, but they are lighter: notso compelling, with less emotional oomph, and so float away moreeasily. This, at any rate, reflects what we hear from the advancedyogis studied in the Davidson lab, as well as from classicmeditation manuals.But we have no data on this point, which remains a riperesearch question. And what that future research might find couldbe surprising—for example, with this shift in relationship to theself, we may see change not so much in the currently knownneural “self-systems” but rather in other circuitry yet to bediscovered.Lessening the grip of the self, always a major goal ofmeditation practitioners, has been oddly ignored by meditationresearchers, who perhaps understandably focus instead on morepopular benefits like relaxation and better health. And so, a keygoal of meditation—selflessness—has only thin data, while otherbenefits, like health improvements, are heavily researched, as wewill see in the next chapter.A LACK OF STICKINESSRichie once saw tears begin to stream down the Dalai Lama’s faceas he heard about a tragic situation in Tibet—the latest self-immolation among Tibetans protesting the Communist Chineseoccupation of their land.And then, a few moments later, the Dalai Lama noticedsomeone in the room doing something funny and he beganlaughing. There was no disrespect for the tragedy that broughthim to tears, but rather, a buoyant and seamless transition fromone emotional note to the other.Paul Ekman, a world expert on emotions and their expression,says this remarkable affective flexibility in the Dalai Lama struckhim as exceptional from their very first meeting. The Dalai Lamareflects in his own demeanor the emotions he feels from oneperson, and then immediately drops that feeling as the nextmoment brings him another emotional reality.18The Dalai Lama’s emotional life seems to include a remarkablydynamic range of strong and colorful emotions, from intensesadness to powerful joy. His rapid, seamless transitions from oneto another are particularly unique—this swift shifting betokens alack of stickiness.Stickiness seems to reflect the dynamics of the emotionalcircuitry of the brain, including the amygdala and the nucleusaccumbens. These regions very likely underlie what traditionaltexts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something thatseems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.The stickiness spectrum runs from being utterly stuck, unableto free ourselves from distressing emotions or addictive wants, tothe Dalai Lama’s instant freedom from any given affect. One traitthat emerges from living without getting stuck seems to be anongoing positivity, even joy.When the Dalai Lama once was asked what had been thehappiest point in his life, he answered, “I think right now.”IN A NUTSHELLThe brain’s default mode activates when we are doing nothing thatdemands mental effort, just letting our mind wander; we hashover thoughts and feelings (often unpleasant) that focus onourselves, constructing the narrative we experience as our “self.”The default mode circuits quiet during mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation. In early stages of meditation this quieting ofthe self-system entails brain circuits that inhibit the default zones;in later practice the connections and activity within those areaswane.This quieting of the self-circuitry begins as a state effect, seenduring or immediately after meditation, but with long-termpractitioners it becomes an enduring trait, along with lessenedactivity in the default mode itself. The resulting decrease instickiness means that self-focused thoughts and feelings that arisein the mind have much less “grab” and decreasing ability to hijackattention.W9Mind, Body, and Genomehen Jon Kabat-Zinn first developed MBSR at theUniversity of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester,he started slowly, talking one by one to physicians there. Heinvited them to refer their patients who had to endure chronicconditions like untreatable pain—those considered medical“failures,” because even narcotics didn’t help—or who had tomanage lifelong conditions like diabetes or heart disease. Jonnever claimed he could cure such diseases. His mission: improvethe quality of patients’ lives.Surprisingly, perhaps, Jon met with almost no resistance fromphysicians. Right from the start, key clinic directors (primary care,pain, orthopedics) were willing to send such patients to what Jonat the time called the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program,based in a basement room borrowed from the physical therapydepartment.Jon led sessions there just a few days a week. But as wordspread of patients praising the method for making their lives withan incurable condition more bearable, the program flourishedand, in 1995, expanded into the Center for Mindfulness inMedicine, Health Care, and Society to house its research, clinical,and professional educational programs. Today hospitals andclinics around the world offer MBSR, one of the fastest-growingkinds of meditation practice, and by now the approach with thestrongest empirical evidence of its benefits. Beyond health care,MBSR has become ubiquitous, spearheading the popularmindfulness movement in psychotherapy, education, and evenbusiness.Now taught at most academic medical centers in NorthAmerica and in many parts of Europe, MBSR offers a standardprogram that makes it appealing for scientific study. To date thereare more than six hundred published studies of the method,revealing a wide variety of benefits—and some instructive caveats.For instance, medicine sometimes falters when it comes totreating chronic pain. Aspirin and other over-the-counter painmedications can have too many side effects to be used daily foryears; steroids offer temporary relief but again with sometimesharmful side effects; and opioids have proven too addictive to beused widely. MBSR, however, can help without such drawbacks,since there are usually no negative side effects of mindfulnesspractice, and if practiced following the eight-week MBSR program,can continue to help people live well with chronic conditions andwith stress-related disorders that will not necessarily get better ontheir own or with conventional medical treatment. A key elementfor long-term benefit is the continuity of practice, and despiteMBSR’s long history, we still have virtually no good informationon the extent to which those who have taken an MBSR coursecontinue to engage in formal practice in the years following theirinitial training.Take debilitating pain in the elderly. One of the most fearedimpacts of growing old is losing independence due to troubleswith mobility from pain in arthritic hips, knees, or spine. In well-designed research with elderly pain sufferers, MBSR proved highlyeffective both in reducing how much pain people felt and howdisabled they became as a result.1 Their lowered pain levels lastedinto a six-month follow-up.As in all MBSR programs, participants were urged to continuea daily practice at home. Having a method they can use on theirown to ease their pain gave these patients a sense of “self-efficacy,”a feeling that they can control their destiny to some extent. This initself helps patients live better with pain that won’t go away.When Dutch researchers analyzed dozens of studies onmindfulness as a pain treatment, they concluded this approachwas a good alternative to purely medical treatment.2 Even so, noresearch so far has found that meditation produces clinicalimprovements in chronic pain by removing the biological cause ofthe pain—the relief comes in how people relate to their pain.Fibromyalgia offers an instructive case in point. This maladypresents a medical mystery: there are no known biologicalexplanations for the chronic pain, fatigue, stiffness, and insomniathat typify this debilitating disorder. The one exception seems tobe impairment in regulating heart function (though this, too, isdebated). One gold standard study that used MBSR with womenwho suffered from fibromyalgia failed to find any impact oncardiac activity.3Even so, another well-designed study found that MBSRbrought significant improvements in psychological symptoms,such as how much stress fibromyalgia patients felt, and lessenedmany of their subjective symptoms.4 The more often they usedMBSR on their own, the better they did. Still, there was no changein the patients’ physical functioning or in a key stress hormone,cortisol, which stayed at high levels. The patients’ relationship totheir pain changed for the better with MBSR—but not theunderlying biology causing the pain itself.Should someone with a disorder like chronic pain orfibromyalgia try MBSR, or meditation ofany kind? Depends whoyou ask.Medical researchers, in endless pursuit of definitive outcomes,have one set of criteria; patients have quite another. While doctorsmay want to see hard data showing medical improvements,patients just want to feel better, especially if there’s little to bedone to relieve their clinical condition. From a patient’s viewpoint,then, mindfulness offers a path to relief—even as medical researchtells doctors the evidence is not clear when it comes to reversingthe biological cause of the pain.Though patients may find relief from pain after they have gonethrough the eight-week MBSR course, many drop the practiceafter a while. That may be why several studies have found goodresults for patients immediately after they take MBSR, but less soin six-month follow-ups. So—as Jon will tell you—the key to alifetime relatively free from the experience of pain, both physicaland emotional, is continuing one’s mindfulness practice day afterday in the following months, years, and decades.WHAT THE SKIN REVEALSOur skin offers a surprising window on how stress impacts ourhealth. As a barrier tissue in direct contact with foreign agentsfrom the world around us (as are the gastrointestinal tract and ourlungs), the skin is part of the body’s first line of defense againstinvading germs. Inflammation signals a biological defensivemaneuver that walls off infection from healthy tissue so it won’tspread. A red, inflamed patch signals that the skin has attacked apathogen.The degree of inflammation in the brain and body play a bigrole in how severe a disease like Alzheimer’s, asthma, or diabeteswill be. Stress, though often psychological, worsens inflammation,apparently part of an ancient biological response to warnings ofdanger that marshals the body’s resources for recovery. (Anothersignal of that response: how you just want to rest when you get theflu.) While the threats that trigger this response in prehistory werephysical, like something that could eat us, these days the triggersare psychological—an angry spouse, a snarky tweet. Yet the body’sreactions are the same, including emotional upset.Human skin has an unusually large number of nerve endings(about five hundred per square inch), each a pathway for the brainto send signals for what’s called “neurogenic,” or brain-caused,inflammation. Skin specialists have long observed that life’s stresscan cause neurogenic flare-ups of inflammatory disorders likepsoriasis and eczema. This makes the skin an appealing lab forstudying how upsets impact our health.Turns out the nerve pathways that let the brain signal the skinto inflame are sensitive to capsaicin, the chemical that makeschilies “hot.” Richie’s lab used this novel fact to create carefullycontrolled patches of inflammation, to see how stress wouldincrease, or meditation muffle, this reaction. Meanwhile, MelissaRosenkranz, a scientist in the lab, invented a clever way to assaythe chemicals that induce inflammation, by creating artificial (andpainless) blisters in the inflamed area that would fill with fluid.The blisters were created in a contraption Melissa built thatuses a vacuum system to raise the first layer of skin in smallcircular areas over the course of forty-five minutes. When doneslowly the method is quite painless, hardly noticed by theparticipants. Tapping that fluid allowed measuring levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, the type of proteins that directly causethose red patches.Richie’s lab compared a group who were taught MBSR withanother who went through HEP (the active control treatment) asthey endured the Trier ordeal—a dispiriting job interview,followed by a tough math workout—a sure way to trigger thepandemonium of the stress response.5 More specifically, thebrain’s threat radar, the amygdala, signals the HPA axis (that’s thehypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal circuitry, if you must know) torelease epinephrine, an important freeze-fight-or-flight brainchemical, along with the stress hormone cortisol, which in turnraises the body’s energy expenditure to respond to the stressor.In addition, in order for the body to ward off bacteria inwounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to thearea to supply immune products that gobble up foreignsubstances. The resulting inflammation in turn signals the brainin ways that activate several neural circuits, including the insulaand its extensive connections throughout the brain. One of theareas triggered by messages from the insula is the anteriorcingulate cortex (ACC), which modulates inflammation and alsoconnects our thoughts and feelings and controls autonomicactivity, including heart rate. Richie’s group discovered that whenthe ACC activates in response to an allergen, people with asthmawill have more attacks twenty-four hours later.6Back to the inflammation study. There were no differences inthe two groups’ subjective reports of distress, nor in their levels ofthe cytokines that trigger inflammation, nor in cortisol, thathormonal precursor of diseases made worse by chronic stress, likediabetes, hardening of the arteries, and asthma.But the MBSR group did better on an unfudgeable test:participants had a significantly smaller patch of inflammationafter the stress test, and their skin was more resilient, healingfaster. That difference held even four months later.Although the subjective benefits of MBSR, and some of thebiological ones, do not seem unique, this impact on inflammationcertainly seems to be. Those who engaged in their MBSR practicesfor thirty-five minutes or more at home daily, compared to thosedoing HEP, showed a greater decrease in pro-inflammatorycytokines, the proteins that trigger the red patch. This,intriguingly, supports an early finding by Jon Kabat-Zinn andsome skin specialists that MBSR can help speed healing frompsoriasis, a condition worsened by inflammatory cytokines (butsome thirty years on, this remains a study not yet replicated bydermatology researchers).7To get a better idea of how meditation practice might heal suchinflammatory conditions, Richie’s lab repeated the stress studyusing highly experienced (around 9,000 lifetime hours of practice)vipassana meditators.8 Result: the meditators not only found thedreaded Trier test less stressful than did a matched cohort ofnovices (as we saw in chapter five), but they also had smallerpatches of inflammation afterward. Most significant, their levels ofthe stress hormone cortisol were 13 percent lower than in thecontrols, a substantial difference that is likely clinicallymeaningful. And the meditators reported being in better mentalhealth than volunteers matched for age and gender who did notmeditate.Important: these seasoned practitioners were not meditatingwhen these measures were taken—this was a trait effect.Mindfulness practice, it seems, lessens inflammation day to day,not just during meditation itself. The benefits seem to show upeven with just four weeks of mindfulness practice (around thirtyhours total), as well as with loving-kindness meditation.9 Whilethose new to MBSR had a mild trend toward lower cortisol, a largedrop in cortisol under stress seems to kick in at some point withcontinued practice. Looks like there’s biological confirmation ofwhat meditators say: it gets easier to handle life’s upsets.Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them.So do continual distractions and a wandering mind, due to thetoxic effects of rumination, where our mind gravitates to troublesin our relationships but never resolves them.David Creswell (whose research we visited in chapter seven)recruited unemployed job seekers—a highly stressed group—andoffered them either a three-day intensive program of mindfulnesstraining or a comparable relaxation program.10 Blood samplesbefore andafter revealed that the meditators, but not those takingrelaxation, had reductions in a key pro-inflammatory cytokine.And, fMRI scans showed, the greater their increase inconnectivity between the prefrontal region and the default areasthat generate our inner stream of chat, the greater the reductionsin the cytokine. Presumably, putting the brakes on destructiveself-talk that floods us with thoughts of hopelessness anddepression—understandable in the unemployed—also loweredcytokine levels. How we relate to our gloomy self-talk has a directimpact on our health.HYPERTENSION? RELAX.The moment you woke up today, were you breathing in orbreathing out?That hard-to-answer question was put to a retreatant by thelate Burmese monk and meditation master Sayadaw U Pandita. Itbespeaks the extremely conscientious and precise version ofmindfulness he was renowned for teaching.The sayadaw was the direct lineage holder of the greatBurmese teacher Mahasi Sayadaw, as well as spiritual guide toAung San Suu Kyi during her years-long house arrest before shebecame Burma’s head of government. On his occasional trips tothe West, Mahasi Sayadaw had instructed many of the best-knownteachers in the vipassana world.Dan had traveled off-season to a rented kids’ summer camp inthe high desert of Arizona to spend a few weeks under U Pandita’sguidance. As Dan later wrote in the New York Times Magazine,“The consuming task of my day was to build a precise attention tomy breath, noticing every nuance of each inhalation andexhalation: its speed, lightness, coarseness, warmth.”11 The pointfor Dan: clear the mind, and so, calm the body.While this retreat was one of a series Dan tried to fit into hisyearly calendar in the decades after returning from his graduateschool sojourns in Asia, it wasn’t just meditation progress hehoped for. Over the fifteen years or so since his last long stay inIndia, his blood pressure had gotten too high, and Dan hoped thisretreat would lower it, at least for a while. His physician had beentroubled by readings over 140/90, the lower border ofhypertension. And when Dan returned home from retreat, he waspleased to find a reading far below that borderline.The notion that people could lower blood pressure throughmeditation largely originated with Dr. Herbert Benson, a HarvardMedical School cardiologist. When we were at Harvard, Dr.Benson had just published one of the first studies on the topicshowing meditation seemed to help lower blood pressure.Herb, as we know him, served on Dan’s dissertationcommittee, and was one of the few faculty members anywhere atHarvard sympathetic to meditation studies. As later research onmeditation and blood pressure have shown, he was on the righttrack.Take, for example, a well-designed study of African Americanmen, who are at particularly high risk for hypertension, cardiacand kidney disease. Just fourteen minutes of mindfulness practicein a group who already suffered from kidney disease lowered themetabolic patterns that, if sustained year after year, lead to thesediseases.12The next step, of course, would be to try mindfulness (or someother variety of meditation) with a similar group, but who had notyet developed a full-blown disease, compare them with a matchedgroup who did something like HEP, and follow them for severalyears to see if meditation headed off the disease (as we wouldhope—but let’s try this study to see for sure).On the other hand, when we look at a larger set of studies thenews here is mixed. In a meta-analysis of eleven clinical studieswhere patients with conditions like heart failure and ischemicheart disease were randomly assigned to meditation training or acomparison group, results were, in the words of the researchers,“encouraging” but not conclusive.13 As usual, the meta-analysiscalled for larger and more rigorous studies.There’s a growing body of research here but a meager yieldwhen we look for well-designed studies. Most have randomizedwait-list controls, which is good, but usually lack an active controlgroup, which would be best. Only with an active control do weknow that the benefits are due to the meditation itself rather thanto the “nonspecific” impact of having an encouraging instructorand a supportive group.GENOMICS“It’s just naive,” a grant reviewer bluntly told Richie, to think thatone will see changes in how genes are expressed during just oneday of meditation. Richie had just received the same negativeopinion via a review from the National Institutes of Healthrejecting his proposal for that exact study.Some background. After genetic scientists mapped the entirehuman genome, they realized it wasn’t enough to just know if wehad a given gene or not. The real questions: Is that geneexpressed? Is it manufacturing the protein for which it isdesigned? And how much? Where is the “volume control” on thegene set?This meant there was another important step: finding whatturns our genes on or off. If we’ve inherited a gene that gives us asusceptibility to a disease like diabetes, we may never develop themalady if, for example, we have a lifelong habit of getting regularexercise and not eating sugar.Sugar turns on the genes for diabetes; exercise turns them off.Sugar and exercise are “epigenetic” influencers, among the many,many factors that control whether or not a gene expresses itself.Epigenetics has become a frontier of genomic studies. And Richiethought meditation just might have epigenetic impacts, “down-regulating” the genes responsible for the inflammatory response.As we’ve seen, meditation seems to do this—but the geneticmechanism for the effect was a complete mystery.Undeterred by the skeptics, his lab went ahead, assayingchanges in the expression of key genes before and after a day ofmeditation in a group of long-term vipassana practitioners(average of about 6,000 lifetime hours).14 They followed a fixedeight-hour schedule of practice sessions throughout the day, andlistened to tapes of some inspiring talks and guided practices byJoseph Goldstein.After the day of practice the meditators had a marked “down-regulation” of inflammatory genes—something that had neverbeen seen before in response to a purely mental practice. Such adrop, if sustained over a lifetime, might help combat diseases withonsets marked by chronic low-grade inflammation. As we’ve said,these include many of the world’s major health problems, rangingfrom cardiovascular disorders, arthritis, and diabetes to cancer.And this epigenetic impact, remember, was a “naive” idea thatcountered the then prevailing wisdom in genetic science. Despiteassumptions to the contrary, Richie’s group had shown that amental exercise, meditation, could be a driver of benefits at thelevel of genes. Genetic science would have to change itsassumptions about how the mind can help manage the body.A handful of other studies find that meditation seems to havesalutary epigenetic effects. Loneliness, for instance, spurs higherlevels of pro-inflammatory genes; MBSR can not only lower thoselevels—but also lessen the feeling of being lonely.15 Though thesewere pilot studies, an epigenetic boost was found in research withtwo other meditation methods. One is Herb Benson’s “relaxationresponse,” which has a person silently repeat a chosen word likepeace as if it were a mantra.16 The other is “yogic meditation,”where the meditator recites a Sanskrit mantra, at first aloud andthen in a whisper, and finally silently, ending with a short deep-breathing relaxation technique.17There are other promising hints for meditation as a force inupgrading our epigenetics. Telomeres are the caps at the end ofDNA strands that reflect how long a cell will live. The longer thetelomere, the longer the life span of that cell will be.Telomerase is the enzymethat slows the age-relatedshortening of telomeres; the more telomerase, the better forhealth and longevity. A meta-analysis of four randomizedcontrolled studies involving a total of 190 meditators foundpracticing mindfulness was associated with increased telomeraseactivity.18Cliff Saron’s project found the same effect after three monthsof intensive practice of mindfulness and compassion meditation.19The more present to their immediate experience, and the lessmind-wandering during concentration sessions, the greater thetelomerase benefit. And a promising pilot study found longertelomeres in women who had an average of four years of regularpractice of loving-kindness meditation.20Then there’s panchakarma, Sanskrit for “five treatments,”which mixes herbal medicines, massage, dietary changes, andyoga with meditation. This approach has its roots in Ayurvedicmedicine, an ancient Indian healing system, and has become anoffering at some upscale health resorts in the United States (and atmany lower-cost health spas in India, if you’re interested).A group who went through a six-day panchakarma treatment,compared to another group who were just vacationing at the sameresort, showed intriguing improvements in a range ofsophisticated metabolic measures that reflect both epigeneticchanges and actual protein expression.21 This means genes arebeing directed in beneficial ways.But here’s our problem: while there might be some positivehealth impacts from panchakarma, the mix of treatments makes itimpossible to tell how much any one of them, like meditation, wasan active agent. The study used five different kinds ofinterventions together. Such a mishmash (technically, a confound)makes it impossible to tell if the meditation was the active force,or perhaps some herb in the medicine, or a vegetarian diet, or ifsomething else in that mix accounts for the improvements.Benefits accrue—we just don’t know why.There’s also the gap between showing improvements at thegenetic level and proving meditation has biological effects thatmatter medically. None of these studies makes that furtherconnection.In addition, there’s the issue of what kind of meditation haswhich physiological impacts. Tania Singer’s group comparedconcentrating on the breath with loving-kindness and also withmindfulness, looking at how each influenced heart rate and howmuch effort meditators reported the methods took.22 The breathmeditation was the most relaxing, with loving-kindness andmindfulness both boosting heart rate a bit, a sign these take moreeffort. Richie’s lab had a similar increase in heart rate with highlyexperienced meditators (more than 30,000 lifetime hours) doingcompassion meditation.23While a quicker heartbeat seems a side effect of thesewarmhearted meditations—a state effect—when it comes to thebreath, the trait payoff goes in the other direction. Science haslong known that people with problems like anxiety disorders andchronic pain breathe more quickly and less regularly than mostfolks. And if you’re already breathing fast, you are more likely totrigger a freeze-fight-or-flight reaction when confrontingsomething stressful.But consider what Richie’s lab found when they looked atlong-term meditators (9,000 average lifetime hours of practice).24Comparing each to a nonmeditator of the same age and sex, themeditators were breathing an average 1.6 breaths more slowly.And this was while they were just sitting still, waiting for acognitive test to start.Over the course of a single day that difference in breath ratetranslates to more than 2,000 extra breaths for the nonmeditators—and more than 800,000 extra breaths over the course of a year.These extra breaths are physiologically taxing, and can exact ahealth toll as time goes on.As practice continues and breathing becomes progressivelyslower, the body adjusts its physiological set point for itsrespiratory rate accordingly. That’s a good thing. While chronicrapid breathing signifies ongoing anxiety, a slower breath rateindicates reduced autonomic activity, better mood, and salutaryhealth.THE MEDITATOR’S BRAINYou may have heard the good news that meditation thickens keyparts of the brain. The first scientific report of this neural benefitcame in 2005 from Sara Lazar, an early grad of Mind and Life’sSummer Research Institute, who became a researcher at HarvardMedical School.25Compared with nonmeditators, her group reported,meditators had greater cortical thickness in areas important forsensing inside one’s own body and for attention, specifically theanterior insula and zones of the prefrontal cortex.Sara’s report has been followed by a stream of others, many(but not all) reporting increased size in key parts of meditators’brains. Less than a decade later (a very short time given how longsuch research takes to ramp up, execute, analyze, and report),there were enough brain imaging studies of meditators to justify ameta-analysis, where twenty-one studies were combined to seewhat held up, what did not.26The results: certain areas of the brain seemed to enlarge inmeditators, among them:The insula, which attunes us to our internal state andpowers emotional self-awareness, by enhancingattention to such internal signals.Somatomotor areas, the main cortical hubs for sensingtouch and pain, perhaps another benefit of increasedbodily awareness.Parts of the prefrontal cortex that operate in payingattention and in meta-awareness, abilities cultivated inalmost all forms of meditation.Regions of the cingulate cortex instrumental in self-regulation, another skill practiced in meditation.The orbitofrontal cortex, also part of the circuitry forself-regulation.And the big news about meditation for older folks comes froma study at UCLA that finds meditation slows the usual shrinkage ofour brain as we age: at age fifty, longtime meditators’ brains are“younger” by 7.5 years compared to brains of nonmeditators of thesame age.27 Bonus: for every year beyond fifty, the brains ofpractitioners were younger than their peers’ by one month andtwenty-two days.Meditation, the researchers conclude, helps preserve the brainby slowing atrophy. While we doubt that brain atrophy actuallycan be reversed, we have reason to agree it can be slowed.But here’s the trouble with the evidence so far. That finding onmeditation and aging brains was a reanalysis of an earlier studydone at UCLA that recruited fifty meditators and fifty peoplematched for age and sex who had never meditated. The researchteam made careful images of their brains and found meditatorsshowed greater cortical gyrification (the folding at the top of theneocortex) and so had more brain growth.28 The longer themeditator had practiced, the more folding.But as the researchers themselves noted, the findings raisemany questions. The specific varieties of meditation practicedamong those fifty ranged from vipassana and Zen to kriya andkundalini forms of yoga. These practices can vary greatly in theparticular mental skill being deployed by a meditator, for exampleopen presence where anything can come into the mind versus atight focus on one thing only, or methods that manage breathingversus those that let breathing be natural. Thousands of hours ofpractice of each of these could well have quite unique impacts,including in neuroplasticity. We don’t know from this study whatmethod results in which change—does every kind of meditationlead to the increases that cause more folding or do just a fewaccount for the bulk of it?This conflation of different kinds of meditation, as though theywere all the same (and so have similar brain impacts), pertainsalso to that meta-analysis. Since the studies included were also amix of meditation types there’s the dilemma that all but a few ofthe brain-imagingfindings are “cross-sectional”—a one-timeimage of the brain.The differences could be due to factors like education orexercise, each of which has its own buffering effect on brains.Then there’s self-selection: perhaps people with the brain changesreported in these studies choose to stick with meditation, whileothers do not—maybe having a bigger insula in the first placemakes you like meditation more. Each of these alternate potentialcauses has nothing to do with meditation.To be fair, the researchers themselves name such drawbacks totheir study. But we highlight them here to underline the ways inwhich a complicated, poorly understood, and tentative scientificfinding can radiate out to the general public as an oversimplifiedmessage of “meditation builds the brain.” The devil, as the sayinghas it, is in the details.So now let’s consider some promising results from threestudies that looked at how just a little meditation practice seemedto have increased volume in parts of the brain, based ondifferences found before and after trying the practice.29 Similarresults of increases in thickness and the like of appropriate brainareas come from other kinds of mental training like memorization—and neuroplasticity means this is quite possible with meditation.But here’s the big problem with all these studies: they have avery small number of subjects, not enough to reach definitiveconclusions. We need many more participants in these studiesbecause of another problem: the brain measures used arerelatively squishy, based on statistical analyses of about 300,000voxels (a voxel is a volume unit, essentially a three-dimensionalpixel, each a 1 cubic millimeter hunk of neural geography).Odds are, a small portion of these 300,000 analyses will showup as statistically “significant,” when they are actually random, aproblem that diminishes as the number of brains being imagedincreases. For now, there’s no way to know in these studies if thefindings of brain growth are actual or an artifact of the methodsused. Another problem: researchers tend to publish their positivefindings but not report nonfindings—times they did not find anyeffect.30Finally, brain measures have become more precise andsophisticated since many of these studies were done. We don’tknow if measurements using the newer, more stringent criteriawould yield the same findings. Our hunch is that better studieswill reveal positive changes in brain structure with meditation, butit’s too early to say. We’re waiting to see.A midcourse correction on meditation and the brain: Richie’slab tried to repeat Sara Lazar’s findings of cortical thickening bylooking at long-term meditators, Westerners with day jobs and aminimum of five years as a practitioner—a group with an averagelifetime 9,000 hours of meditation.31 But the thickening Sara hadreported did not show up, nor did several other structural changesthat had been reported for MBSR.There are many more questions than answers at this point.Some of the answers may come from data being analyzed as wewrite this, from Tania Singer’s laboratory at the Max PlanckInstitute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. There they arevery carefully and systematically examining changes in corticalthickness associated with three different types of meditationpractice (reviewed in chapter six, “Primed for Love”), in a massivestudy using a rigorous design with a large number of participantspracticing over nine months.One of the early findings to emerge from this work: differenttypes of training are associated with different anatomical effectson the brain. For example, a method that emphasizes cognitiveempathy and understanding how a person views life events wasfound to enhance cortical thickness in a specific region of thecortex toward the back of the brain, between the temporal andparietal lobes, known as the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ. Inprevious research by Tania’s team, the TPJ has been foundparticularly active when we take another person’s perspective.32That brain change was found only with this method, and notwith the others. Such findings underscore the importance formeditation researchers to distinguish among different types ofpractice, particularly when it comes to pinpointing related changesin the brain.NEUROMYTHOLOGYWhile we’re spotlighting some of the neuromythology out andabout concerning meditation, let’s look at one bit that traces backto Richie’s own research.33 As of this writing, the best-knownstudy from Richie’s lab has 2,813 citations, an astonishing renownfor an academic article. Dan was among the first to report on thisresearch, in his book about the meeting in 2000 with the DalaiLama on destructive emotions, where Richie presented this workin progress.34The research has gone viral outside the academy,reverberating through the echo chamber of big and social mediaalike. And those bringing mindfulness to companies invariablymention it as “proof” the method will help folks there.Yet that study raises large question marks in the eyes ofscientists, especially Richie himself. We’re talking about the timehe had Jon Kabat-Zinn teach MBSR to volunteers at a high-stressbiotech start-up where people were on the run virtually 24/7.First, some background. For several years Richie pursued dataon the ratio of activity in the right versus left prefrontal cortexwhile people were at rest. More right-side activity than leftcorrelated with negative moods like depression and anxiety;relatively more left-side activity was associated with buoyantmoods like energy and enthusiasm.That ratio appeared to predict a person’s day-to-day moodrange. For the general population this ratio seemed to fit a bellcurve, with most of us in the middle—we have good days and baddays. A very few people are at the extremes of the curve; if towardthe left, they bounce back from feeling down, if toward the rightthey might be clinically anxious or depressed.The study at the biotech start-up seemed to show a remarkableshift in brain function after the meditation training—from tiltingtoward the right to a leftward pitch, and reporting a switch into amore relaxed state. There were no such changes in a comparisongroup of workers assigned to a wait list, who were told they wouldreceive the meditation training later.But here’s one major hitch. This research was never replicated,and was designed only as a pilot. We don’t know, for instance, ifan active control like HEP would result in similar benefits.While that study was never replicated, others seem to supportthe finding on the brain ratio and its shift. A German study ofpatients with recurring episodes of severe depression found theirratio tilted strongly toward the right—which may be a neuralmarker of the disorder.35 And the same German researchers foundthat this right-side tilt shifted back toward the left—but only whilethey were practicing mindfulness, not at normal rest.36The problem: Richie’s lab has not been able to show that thistilt toward left-side activation continues to grow stronger the moreyou meditate. Richie hit a snag when he started bringing to his labOlympic-level meditators, Tibetan yogis (more about them inchapter twelve, “Hidden Treasure”). These experts, who hadlogged off-the-charts hours of meditation, did not show theexpected whopping leftward tilt—despite being some of the mostoptimistic and happy people Richie has ever known.This undermined Richie’s confidence in the measure, which hehas discontinued. Richie has no sure sense of why that left/rightmeasure failed to work as expected with the yogis. One possibility:a tilt toward the left may occur at the beginning of meditationpractice, but other than a small range of change, the left/rightratio does not budge much. It may reflect temporary pressures orbasictemperament but does not seem associated with enduringqualities of well-being or more complex changes in the brainfound in those with high levels of meditation experience.Our current thinking holds that in later stages of meditationother mechanisms kick in, so that what changes is your relation toany and all emotions, rather than the ratio of positive to negativeones. With high levels of meditation practice, emotions seem tolose their power to pull us into their melodrama.Another possibility: different branches of meditation havedisparate effects, so there may not be a clear line of developmentthat’s continuous from, say, mindfulness in beginners, to long-term vipassana practitioners, to the Tibetan experts assayed inRichie’s lab.And then there’s the question of who teaches mindfulness. AsJon has told us, MBSR teachers vary greatly in expertise, in howmuch meditation retreat time they have put in, and in their ownqualities of being. The biotech company had the benefit of havingJon himself as their teacher—over and above instruction in theMBSR techniques, he has unique gifts in imparting a view ofreality that can potentially shift students’ experience in ways that,possibly, might account for a shift in brain asymmetry. We don’tknow what the impacts would be if some other, randomly selected,MBSR teacher had come there.THE BOTTOM LINEBack to Dan and the meditation retreat he attended in hopes oflowering his blood pressure. Although he did get a big drop in hisblood pressure readings immediately afterward, it’s impossible toknow whether it was because of the meditation or a more general“vacation effect,” the relief we all feel when we drop our dailypressures and get away for a while.37Within weeks his blood pressure readings were high again—and stayed that way until an astute physician guessed that hemight have one of the few known causes of hypertension, a rarehereditary adrenal disorder. A medication that corrects thatmetabolic imbalance brought his blood pressure down to stay—while meditation did not.Our questions are simple when it comes to whether meditationleads to better health: What’s true, what’s not, and what’s notknown? As we leapt into our survey of the hundreds of studieslinking meditation to health effects, we applied strict standards.As is true of all too much meditation research, the methods usedin many studies of health impacts fail to clear the highest bar. Thatleft us surprised by how little we can say with certainty, given thegreat excitement (and, okay, hype) about meditation as a way toboost health.The sounder studies, we found, focus on lessening ourpsychological distress rather than on curing medical syndromes orlooking for underlying biological mechanisms. So, when it comesto a better quality of life for those with chronic diseases, yes tomeditation. Such palliative care gets ignored too often inmedicine, but it matters enormously to patients.Still, might meditation offer biological relief? Consider theDalai Lama, now in his eighties, who goes to bed at 7:00 p.m. andgets a full night’s sleep before he awakens around 3:30 for a four-hour stint of spiritual practice, including meditation. Add anotherhour of practice before he goes to bed and that gives him fivehours a day of contemplative time.But painful arthritis in his knees makes going up or downstairs an ordeal—not uncommon for someone in the ninth decadeof life. When he was asked if meditation helps medical conditions,he retorted, “If meditation was good for all health problems, I’d befree of pain in my knees.”When it comes to whether meditation does more than offerpalliative help, we’re not sure yet—and if so, in what medicalconditions?A few years after Richie got that stinging rejection of his planto measure genetic changes from one day of meditation, he wasinvited to give the prestigious Stephen E. Straus Lecture at theNational Institutes of Health, a yearly talk in honor of the founderof the National Center for Complementary and IntegrativeHealth.38Richie’s topic, “Change Your Brain by Training Your Mind,”was controversial, to say the least, among the many skeptics onthe NIH campus. But, come the day of his talk, the augustauditorium at the Clinical Center was packed, with many scientistswatching a live stream from their offices—perhaps an augury ofthe changing status of meditation as a topic for serious research.Richie’s lecture focused on the findings in this area, mainlythose from his lab, most of which are described in this book.Richie illuminated the neural, biological, and behavioral changeswrought by meditation, and how they might help maintain health—for instance, in better emotion regulation and sharpenedattention. And, as we’ve tried to do here, Richie walked a verycareful line between critical rigor and genuine conviction thatthere is really a “there” there: that meditation has beneficialimpacts worthy of serious scientific investigation.At the end of his talk, despite its staid academic tone, Richiereceived a standing ovation.IN A NUTSHELLNone of the many forms of meditation studied here was originallydesigned to treat illness, at least as we recognize it in the West. Yettoday the scientific literature is replete with studies assessingwhether these ancient practices might be useful for treating justsuch illnesses. MBSR and similar methods can reduce theemotional component of suffering from disease, but not cure thosemaladies. Yet mindfulness training—even as short as three days—produces a short-term decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokines,the molecules responsible for inflammation. And the more youpractice, the lower the level becomes of these pro-inflammatorycytokines. This seems to become a trait effect with extensivepractice, with imaging studies finding in meditators at rest lowerlevels of pro-inflamatory cytokines, along with an increasedconnectivity between regulatory circuitry and sectors of the brain’sself system, particularly the posterior cingulate cortex.Among experienced meditation practitioners, a daylong periodof intensive mindfulness practice down-regulates genes involvedin inflammation. The enzyme telomerase, which slows cellularaging, increases after three months of intensive practice ofmindfulness and loving-kindness. Finally, long-term meditationmay lead to beneficial structural changes in the brain, thoughcurrent evidence is inconclusive about whether such effectsemerge with relatively short-term practice like MBSR, or onlybecome apparent with longer-term practice. All in all, the hints ofneural rewiring that undergird altered traits seem scientificallycredible, though we await further studies for specifics.D10Meditation as Psychotherapyr. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, had aquestion: “What is mindfulness?”It was the mid-1980s, and Dr. Beck was asking Tara Bennett-Goleman, Dan’s wife. She had come to his home in Ardmore,Pennsylvania, at Dr. Beck’s request, because Judge Judith Beck,his wife, was about to undergo some elective surgery. Dr. Beck hada hunch meditation might help better prepare her mentally and,perhaps, even physically.Tara instructed the couple on the spot. Following her guidancethe Becks sat quietly and observed the sensations of theirbreathing in and out, then tried a walking meditation in theirliving room.That was a hint of what has since become a strong movementin “mindfulness-based cognitive therapy,” or MBCT. Tara’s bookEmotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart was thefirst to integrate mindfulness with cognitive therapy.1Tara had for years been a student of vipassana meditation andhad recently completed a months-long intensive retreat with theBurmese meditation master U Pandita. That deep dive into themind had yielded many insights, including one about the lightnessHis remarkable career includedcofounding the Mind and Life Institute, which had organized thisvery gathering.As a serious meditation practitioner, Francisco could see thepromise for a full collaboration between seasoned meditators andthe scientists studying them. That model became standardpractice in Richie’s lab, as well as others.Francisco had been scheduled to participate, but he wasfighting liver cancer and a severe downturn meant he could nottravel. He was in his bed at home in Paris, close to dying.This was in the days before Skype and videoconferencing, butRichie’s group managed a two-way video hookup between ourmeeting room and Francisco’s bedroom in his Paris apartment.The Dalai Lama addressed him very directly, looking closely intothe camera. They both knew that this would be the very last timethey would see each other in this lifetime.The Dalai Lama thanked Francisco for all he had done forscience and for the greater good, told him to be strong, and saidthat they would remain connected forever. Richie and manyothers in the room had tears streaming down, appreciating themomentous import of the moment. Just days after the meeting,Francisco passed away.Three years later, in 2004, an event occurred that made real adream Francisco had often talked about. At the Garrison Institute,an hour up the Hudson River from New York City, one hundredscientists, graduate students, and postdocs had gathered for thefirst in what has become a yearly series of events, the SummerResearch Institute (SRI), a gathering devoted to furthering therigorous study of meditation.The meetings are organized by the Mind and Life Institute,itself formed in 1987 by the Dalai Lama, Francisco, and AdamEngle, a lawyer turned businessman. We were founding boardmembers. The mission of Mind and Life is “to alleviate sufferingand promote flourishing by integrating science with contemplativepractice.”Mind and Life’s summer institute, we felt, could offer a morewelcoming reality for those who, like us in our grad school days,wanted to do research on meditation. While we had been isolatedpioneers, we wanted to knit together a community of like-mindedscholars and scientists who shared this quest. They could besupportive of each other’s work at a distance, even if they werealone in their interests at their own institution.Details of the SRI were hatched over the kitchen table inRichie’s home in Madison, in a conversation with Adam Engle.Richie and a handful of scientists and scholars then organized thefirst summer program and served as faculty for the week,featuring topics like the cognitive neuroscience of attention andmental imagery. As of this writing, thirteen more meetings havefollowed (with two so far in Europe, and possibly future meetingsin Asia and South America).Beginning with the very first SRI, the Mind and Life Institutebegan a program of small grants named in honor of Francisco.These few dozen, very modest Varela research awards (up to$25,000, though most research of this kind takes far more infunding) have leveraged more than $60 million in follow-onfunding from foundations and US federal granting agencies. Andthe initiative has borne plentiful fruit: fifty or so graduates of theSRI have published several hundred papers on meditation.As these young scientists entered academic posts, they swelledthe numbers of researchers doing such studies. They have drivenin no small part the ever-growing numbers of scientific studies onmeditation.At the same time, more established scientists have shiftedtheir focus toward this area as results showed valuable yield. Thefindings rolling out of Richie’s brain lab at the University ofWisconsin—and labs of other scientists, from the medical schoolsof Stanford and Emory, Yale and Harvard, and far beyond—routinely make headlines.Given meditation’s booming popularity, we feel a need for ahard-nosed look. The neural and biological benefits bestdocumented by sound science are not necessarily the ones we hearabout in the press, on Facebook, or from email marketing blasts.And some of those trumpeted far and wide have little scientificmerit.Many reports boil down to the ways a short daily dose ofmeditation alters our biology and emotional life for the better.This news, gone viral, has drawn millions worldwide to find a slotin their daily routine for meditation.But there are far greater possibilities—and some perils. Themoment has come to tell the bigger tale the headlines are missing.There are several threads in the tapestry we weave here. Onecan be seen in the story of our decades-long friendship and ourshared sense of a greater purpose, at first a distant and unlikelygoal but one in which we persisted despite obstacles. Anothertraces the emergence of neuroscience’s evidence that ourexperiences shape our brains, a platform supporting our theorythat as meditation trains the mind, it reshapes the brain. Thenthere’s the flood of data we’ve mined to show the gradient of thischange.At the outset, mere minutes a day of practice have surprisingbenefits (though not all those that are claimed). Beyond suchpayoffs at the beginning, we can now show that the more hoursyou practice, the greater the benefits you reap. And at the highestlevels of practice we find true altered traits—changes in the brainthat science has never observed before, but which we proposeddecades ago.O2Ancient Cluesur story starts one early November morning in 1970, whenthe spire of the stupa in Bodh Gaya was lost to view,enveloped in the ethereal mist rising from the Niranjan Rivernearby. Next to the stupa stood a descendant of the very BodhiTree under which, legend has it, Buddha sat in meditation as hebecame enlightened.Through the mist that morning, Dan glimpsed an elderlyTibetan monk amble by as he made his postdawn rounds,circumambulating the holy site. With short-cropped gray hair andeyeglasses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, he fingered hismala beads while mumbling softly a mantra praising the Buddhaas a sage, or muni in Sanskrit: “Muni, muni, mahamuni,mahamuniya swaha!”A few days later, friends happened to bring Dan to visit thatvery monk, Khunu Lama. He inhabited a sparse, unheated cell, itsconcrete walls radiating the late-fall chill. A wooden-plank tucketserved as both bed and day couch, with a small stand alongside forperching texts to read—and little else. As befits a monk, the roomwas empty of any private belongings.From the early-morning hours until late into the night, KhunuLama would sit on that bed, a text always open in front of him.Whenever a visitor would pop in—and in the Tibetan world thatcould be at just about any time—he would invariably welcomethem with a kindly gaze and warm words.Khunu’s qualities—a loving attention to whoever came to seehim, an ease of being, and a gentle presence—struck Dan as quiteunlike, and far more positive than, the personality traits he hadbeen studying for his degree in clinical psychology at Harvard.That training focused on negatives: neurotic patterns,overpowering burdensome feelings, and outrightpsychopathology.Khunu, on the other hand, quietly exuded the better side ofhuman nature. His humility, for instance, was fabled. The storygoes that the abbot of the monastery, in recognition of Khunu’sspiritual status, offered him as living quarters a suite of rooms onthe monastery’s top floor, with a monk to serve as an attendant.Khunu declined, preferring the simplicity of his small, baremonk’s cell.Khunu Lama was one of those rare masters revered by allschools of Tibetan practice. Even the Dalai Lama sought him outfor teachings, receiving instructions on Shantideva’sBodhicharyavatara, a guide to the compassion-filled life of abodhisattva. To this day, whenever the Dalai Lama teaches thistext,of thoughts when viewed through the lens of mindfulness. Thatinsight mirrors a principle in cognitive therapy of “decentering,”observing thoughts and feelings without being overly identifiedwith them. We can reappraise our suffering.Dr. Beck had heard about Tara from one of his close students,Dr. Jeffrey Young, who at the time was establishing the firstcognitive therapy center in New York City. Tara, with a freshlyminted master’s degree in counseling, was training with Dr. Youngat his center. The two were jointly treating a young woman whosuffered from panic attacks.Dr. Young used a cognitive therapy approach, helping herdistance herself from her catastrophizing thoughts—I can’tbreathe, I’m going to die—and challenge them. Tara broughtmindfulness into the sessions, complementing Dr. Young’stherapy approach with this unique lens on the mind. Learning toobserve her breath mindfully—calmly and clearly, without panic—helped that patient overcome her panic attacks.Working independently, psychologist John Teasdale at theUniversity of Oxford, with Zindel Segal and Mark Williams, waswriting Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression,another such integration.2 His research had revealed that forpeople with depression so severe that drugs or even electroshocktreatments were no help, this mindfulness-based cognitive therapy(MBCT) cut the rate of relapse by half—more than any medication.Such remarkable findings unleashed what has become a waveof research on MBCT. As has been true of most studies ofmeditation and psychotherapy, though, many of those studies(including Teasdale’s original one) failed to meet the goldstandard for clinical outcome research: randomized controlgroups and an equivalent comparison treatment by practitionerswho believe theirs will bring results.Some years later a group from Johns Hopkins Universitylooked at what numbered by then forty-seven studies ofmeditation alone (that is, without including cognitive therapy)with patients suffering from distress ranging from depression andpain to sleep problems and overall quality of life—as well asmaladies ranging from diabetes and arterial disease to tinnitusand irritable bowel syndrome.This review, by the way, was exemplary in calculating thehours of meditation practice being studied: MBSR entailed twentyto twenty-seven hours of training over eight weeks, othermindfulness programs about half that. Transcendental meditationtrials gave sixteen to thirty-nine hours over three to twelvemonths, and other mantra meditations about half that amount.In a prominent article in one of the JAMA journals (the officialpublications of the American Medical Association), theresearchers concluded that mindfulness (but not mantra-basedmeditation like TM, for which there were too few well-designedstudies to make any conclusions) could lessen anxiety anddepression, as well as pain. The degree of improvement was aboutas much as for medications, but without troubling side effects—making mindfulness-based therapies a viable alternativetreatment for these conditions.But no such benefits were found for other health indicatorslike eating habits, sleep, substance use, or weight problems. Whenit came to other psychological troubles, like ugly moods,addictions, and poor attention, the meta-analysis found little or noevidence that any kind of meditation might help—at least in theshort-term interventions used in the research. Long-termmeditation practice, they note, might well offer more benefits,though there were too little data on this for them to draw anyconclusion.The main problem: what had seemed promising for relievingproblems from earlier studies of meditation disappeared into amist when compared to the benefits from an active control likeexercise. Bottom line for a wide range of stress-based problems:“insufficient evidence of any effect,” at least as yet.3From a medical perspective, these studies were the equivalentof a “low-dose, short-term” trial of a medication. Therecommendation here: that more research be done, using farlarger numbers of people and for a far longer period. That’s quiteapt for studies of treatments like a drug—the research modeldominant in medicine. But such studies are enormouslyexpensive, costing in the millions of dollars—and are paid for bydrug companies or the National Institutes of Health. No such luckwhen it comes to meditation.Another sticking point, and this a bit nerdy: the meta-analysisbegan by collecting 18,753 citations of articles of all kinds aboutmeditation (a huge number, given that we could find but a paltryhandful back in the 1970s, and just above 6,000 now—they used abroader number of search terms than we did). About half of thosethe authors spotted, though, were not reports of actual data; of theempirical reports, about 4,800 had no control group or were notrandomized. After careful sifting, only 3 percent (that’s the 47 inthe analysis)—of the studies proved sufficiently well designed thatthey could be included in the review. As the Hopkins group pointsout, this simply underscores the need to upgrade meditationresearch.This type of review carries great weight with physicians, in anera when medicine strives to become more evidence based. TheHopkins group did this meta-analysis for the Agency forHealthcare Research and Quality, whose guidelines physicians tryto follow.The review’s conclusion: meditation (in particular,mindfulness) can have a role in treating depression, anxiety, andpain—about as much as medications but with no side effects.Meditation also can, to a lesser degree, reduce the toll ofpsychological stress. Overall, meditation has not been provenbetter for psychological distress than medical treatments, thoughthe evidence for stronger conclusions remains insufficient.But this was true as of 2013 (the study was published inJanuary, 2014). With the quickened pace of meditation research,more and better-designed studies may overturn such judgments,at least to a degree.Depression marks a singular case in point.CHASING THE BLUES AWAY—WITHMINDFULNESSThe remarkable finding from John Teasdale’s group at Oxford,that MBCT cut relapse in severe depression by around 50 percent,energized some impressive follow-up research. After all, a 50percent drop in relapse outreaches by far what any medicationused for severe depression can claim. If this beneficial impactwere true of a drug, some pharmaceutical company would beminting money from it.The need for more rigorous studies was clear; the originalTeasdale pilot study had no control group, let alone a comparisonactivity. Mark Williams, one of Teasdale’s original researchpartners at Oxford, spearheaded the research needed. His teamrecruited almost three hundred people with depression so severethat medications could not prevent them relapsing into doom andgloom—the same sort of difficult-to-treat patients as in theoriginal study.But this time the patients were randomly assigned to eitherMBCT or one of two active control groups where they eitherlearned the basics of cognitive therapy or just had the usualpsychiatric treatments.4 The patients were tracked for six monthsto see if they had a relapse. MBCT proved more effective when itcame to patients with a history of childhood trauma (which canmake depression all the worse), and about the same as standardtreatments with run-of-the-mill depression.Soon after, a European group found that for a similar groupwith depression so severe that no medication helped them, MBCTdid.5 This, too, was a randomized study with an active controlgroup. And by 2016 a meta-analysis of nine such studies with atotal 1,258 patients concluded that, over a year afterward, MBCTwas an effective way to lower the relapse rate in severe depression.The more severe the symptoms of depression,the larger thebenefits from MBCT.6Zindel Segal, one of John Teasdale’s collaborators, delvedmore deeply into why MBCT seemed so effective.7 He used fMRIto compare patients who had recovered from a bout of majordepression, some of whom did MBCT, while the others receivedstandard cognitive therapy (that is, without mindfulness). Thosepatients who, after treatments, showed a greater increase in theactivity of their insula had 35 percent fewer relapses.The reason? In a later analysis, Segal found the best outcomeswere in those patients most able to “decenter,” that is, step outsidetheir thoughts and feelings enough to see them as just coming andgoing, rather than getting carried away by “my thoughts andfeelings.” In other words, these patients were more mindful. Andthe more time they put into mindfulness practice, the lower theirodds of a relapse into depression.At last a critical mass of research demonstrated to thesatisfaction of the skeptical medical world that a mindfulness-based method could be effective for treating depression.There are several variations of promising applications ofMBCT for depression. For instance, women who are pregnant andhave a previous history of depressive episodes naturally want to besure they do not get depressed while carrying their baby or afterthe birth, and they are understandably leery of takingantidepressants while pregnant. Good news: a team led by SonaDimidjian, another grad of the Summer Research Institute, foundthat MBCT could lower the depression risk in these women, andso offered a user-friendly alternative to drugs.8When researchers from the Maharishi International Universitytaught TM to prisoners with standard prison programs as thecomparison, they found that four months later the prisoners doingTM showed fewer symptoms of trauma, anxiety, and depression;they also slept better and perceived their days as less stressful.9Another instance: the angst-filled teen years can see the firstonset of depressive symptoms. In 2015, 12.5 percent of the USpopulation aged twelve to seventeen had at least one majordepressive episode the previous year. This translates to about 3million teens. While some of the more obvious signs of depressioninclude negative thinking, severe self-criticism, and the like,sometimes the signs take subtle forms, like trouble sleeping orthinking or shortness of breath. A mindfulness program designedfor teens reduced overt depression and such subtle signs, even sixmonths after it ended.10All of these studies, tantalizing as they are, need replication aswell as upgrades to their design if they are to be acceptable tostrict medical review standards. Still, for the person suffering fromdepressive bouts—or anxiety or pain—MBCT (and maybe TM)offers the possibility of relief.Then there’s the question of whether MBCT or meditation inalternate forms might relieve symptoms of other psychiatricmaladies. And if so, what are the mechanisms that explain this?Let’s revisit that research on MBSR for people with socialanxiety done by Philippe Goldin and James Gross at StanfordUniversity (we reviewed it in chapter five). Social anxiety, whichcan look like anything from stage fright to shyness at gatherings,turns out to be a surprisingly common emotional problem,affecting more than 6 percent of the US population, around 15million people.11After the eight-week MBSR course the patients reportedfeeling less anxiety, a good sign. But you may recall the next step,which makes the study more intriguing: the patients also wentinto a brain scanner while doing a breath awareness meditation tomanage their emotions as they listened to upsetting phrases like“people always judge me,” one of the common fears in the mentalself-talk among those with social anxiety. The patients reportedfeeling less anxious than usual on hearing such emotional triggers—and at the same time, brain activity lessened in their amygdalaand increased in circuitry for attention.This peek at the underlying brain activity may hint at thefuture of research on how meditation might relieve mentalproblems. For several years now—at least as of this writing—theNational Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the main source offunding for studies in this area, has disdained research that relieson the old categories of psychiatry listed in the field’s Diagnosticand Statistical Manual (DSM).While mental disorders like “depression” in its severalvarieties are in the DSM, the NIMH favors research that focuseson specific symptom clusters and their underlying brain circuitry—not just DSM categories. Along these lines, we wonder, forexample, if the finding from Oxford, that MBCT works well withdepressed patients who have a history of trauma, suggests that anoverly reactive amygdala may be more involved in this treatment-resistant subgroup than among others who get depressed fromtime to time.While we are pondering future research, here are a few morequestions: What precisely is the added value of mindfulnesscompared with cognitive therapy? What disorders does meditation(including its use in MBSR and MBCT) relieve better than currentstandard psychiatric treatments? Should these methods be usedalong with those standard interventions? And what specific kindsof meditation work best to relieve which mental problems—andwhile we’re at it, what’s the underlying neural circuitry?For now, these are unanswered questions. We’re waiting tofind out.LOVING-KINDNESS MEDITATION FORTRAUMARecall that on September 11, 2001, a jet smashed into thePentagon near Steve Z, and what had been an open office wasinstantly blasted into a haze-filled sea of wreckage, reeking ofburned fuel. When the office was rebuilt he moved back to the verydesk he had been sitting at on 9/11, but in a much lonelier setting—most of his office buddies had been killed in the fireball.Steve recalls his feelings then: “We were fueled by rage: Thosebastards—we’ll get them! It was a dark place, a miserable time.”His severe PTSD was cumulative; Steve had previously servedin combat theaters in Desert Storm and Iraq. The catastrophe of9/11 intensified the trauma that had already been building.For years after, anger, frustration, and hypervigilant distrustroiled within. But if anyone asked how he was doing, Steve’s storyline was, “No problem.” He tried self-soothing with alcohol, hardjogging, visiting family, reading—anything to try to get a grip.Steve was close to suicide when he entered Walter ReedHospital for help, went through detox from alcohol, and slowlybegan the road to healing. He learned about his condition andagreed to meet with the psychotherapist he still sees, whointroduced him to mindfulness meditation.After two or three months of sobriety he tried to join a localmindfulness group, which met once a week. The first few timesSteve went he walked in hesitantly, checked around the place, saw“these are not my people”—and walked out. Besides, he feltclaustrophobic in closed spaces.When he was finally able to try a short mindfulness retreat, hefound it helped. And in particular what really clicked was theloving-kindness practice, a workable way to have compassion forhimself as well as other people. With loving-kindness, he felt “athome again,” a deep reminder of how he felt as a young boyplaying with friends—a strong sense things were going to be okay.“Practice helped me stay with those feelings and know, ‘Thiswill pass.’ If I was getting angry, I could throw a little compassionand loving-kindness for myself and the other person.”Last we heard, Steve had gone back to school in mental healthcounseling, gotten credentialed as a psychotherapist, and wascompleting a clinical doctorate. His dissertation topic: “moralinjury and spiritual wellness.”He connected with the Veterans Administration and supportgroups for military people like him with PTSD, and has beengetting referrals from them for his small private practice. Stevefeels uniquely equipped to help.First findings say Steve’s instincts had it right. At the SeattleVeterans Administration hospital, forty-two vets with PTSD took atwelve-week course in loving-kindness meditation, the kind Stevefound helped him.12 Three months later their PTSD symptoms hadimproved, and depression—a common side symptom—hadlessened a bit.These early findings are promising, but we don’t know, say, ifan active control condition like HEP would be just as effective. Thecaveats for the research on PTSD to date pretty much sum up thestate of the art for scientific validation of meditation as atreatment for most psychiatric disorders.Still, there are many arguments for compassion practice as anantidote to PTSD, beginning with anecdotal reports like Steve’s.13Many are practical. A large proportion of veterans have PTSD; inany given year, between 11 and 20 percent of veterans suffer fromPTSD, and over a veteran’s lifetime that number goes up to 30percent. If loving-kindness practice works, it offers a cost-effectivegroup treatment.Another reason: among the symptoms of PTSD are emotionalnumbness, alienation, and a sense of “deadness” in relationships—all of which loving-kindness might help reverse by the cultivationof positive feelings toward others. Still another: many vets dislikethe side effects of the drugs they are given for PTSD, so they donot take them at all—and on their own are searching fornontraditional treatments. Loving-kindness appeals on bothcounts.DARK NIGHTS“I experienced a wave of self-hatred so shocking, so intense, that itchanged the way I relate . . . to my own dharma path and themeaning of life itself.” So recalls Jay Michaelson of the moment ona long, silent vipassana retreat when he fell into what he calls a“dark night” of intensely difficult mental states.14The Visuddhimagga pegs this crisis as most likely at the pointa meditator experiences the transitory lightness of thoughts. Righton schedule, Michaelson hit his dark night after having cruisedthrough a quietly ecstatic landmark on that path, the stage of“arising and passing,” where thoughts seem to disappear as soonas they begin, in rapid succession.Shortly afterward he plunged into his dark night, a thickmixture of morbid doubt, self-loathing, anger, guilt, and anxiety.At one point the toxic mix was so strong, his practice collapsed; hebroke down in tears.But then he slowly began observing his mind rather than beingsucked into the thoughts and feelings that swirled through it. Hebegan to see these feelings as passing mental states, like anyothers. The episode was over.Other such tales of meditative dark nights do not always havesuch a clean resolution; the meditator’s suffering can be ongoinglong after leaving the meditation center. Because the manypositive impacts of meditation are far more widely known, somewho go through dark nights discover people can’t comprehend oreven believe that they are hurting. All too frequentlypsychotherapists are little or no help.Realizing the need, Willoughby Britton, a psychologist atBrown University (and a grad of the SRI), heads the “dark nightproject,” which aids people who suffer from meditation-relatedpsychological difficulties. Her Varieties of the ContemplativeExperience project, as it is more formally called, adds to the morewidely known beneficial impacts of meditation a caveat: Whenmight it do harm?At the moment, there are no firm answers. Britton has beencollecting case studies and helping those who suffer from a darknight to understand what they are going through, that they are notalone, and, hopefully, to recover. Her study subjects have beenlargely referrals from guiding teachers at vipassana meditationcenters where, over the years, there have been occasional darknight casualties during intensive retreats—despite those centerstrying to weed out the vulnerable by asking on enrollment formsabout psychiatric histories. To be sure, dark nights may not berelated to such histories.Dark nights are not unique to vipassana; most everymeditative tradition warns about them. In Judaism, for example,Kabbalistic texts caution that contemplative methods are bestreserved for middle age, lest an unformed ego fall apart.At this point no one knows whether intensive meditationpractice is in itself a danger to certain people, or if those whosuffer dark nights might have had a breakdown of some sort nomatter their circumstances. While Britton’s case studies areanecdotal, their very existence is compelling.The proportion of dark nights among all those who doprolonged retreats are, by all accounts, very small—though no onecan say precisely what that proportion might be. From a researchperspective, one of the findings needed would be to establish baserates for such difficulties both among meditators and in thepopulation at large.Nearly one in five adults in the United States, nearly 44million, were found by the National Institute of Mental Health tosuffer from a mental illness in any given year. Both freshman yearat college and military boot camp—and even psychotherapy—areknown to precipitate psychological crises in a certain smallpercentage of people. The research question becomes, Is theresomething about deep meditation that puts some people at riskover and above this base rate?For those who do have such a dark night, Willoughby Britton’sprogram offers practical advice and comfort. And despite the(rather low) risk of dark nights, especially during prolongedretreats, meditation has come into vogue among psychotherapists.MEDITATION AS METATHERAPYIn Dan’s first article on meditation he proposed it might be used inpsychotherapy.15 That article, “Meditation as Meta-Therapy,”appeared during Dan’s 1971 sojourn in India, and nary apsychotherapist showed much interest. Yet on his return hesomehow was invited to lecture on this notion at a meeting of theMassachusetts Psychological Association.After his talk ended, a slim, bright-eyed young man wearing anill-fitting sport jacket approached him, saying he was a graduatestudent in psychology with similar interests. He had spent severalyears as a monk in Thailand studying meditation, surviving thereon the generosity of the Thai people, a country where everyhousehold finds it an honor to feed monks. No such luck in NewEngland.This grad student thought that as a psychologist he couldadapt meditative tools, in the guise of psychotherapy, to alleviatepeople’s suffering. He was glad to hear someone else was makingthe connection between meditation and therapeutic applications.That grad student was Jack Kornfield, on whose dissertationcommittee Richie served. Jack became one of the founders of,first, the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, andthen went on to found Spirit Rock, a meditation center in the SanFrancisco Bay Area. Jack has been a pioneer in translatingBuddhist theories of the mind into language attuned to themodern sensibility.16Jack, along with a group including Joseph Goldstein, designedand ran the teacher training program that graduated the veryteachers who helped Steve Z recover from his PTSD all those yearslater. Jack’s own explanation of Buddhist psychological theories,The Wise Heart, shows how this perspective on the mind andworking with meditation can be used in psychotherapy—or onyour own. This synthesis was the first of his by now many booksintegrating traditional Eastern and modern approaches.Another main voice in this movement has been Mark Epstein,a psychiatrist. Mark was a student in Dan’s psychology ofconsciousness course, and, as a Harvard senior, he asked Dan tobe his faculty adviser for an honors project on Buddhistpsychology. Dan, at the time the only member of the Harvardpsychology department with interest and a bit of knowledge in thearea, agreed; Mark and Dan later wrote an article together in ashort-lived journal.17In a series of books integrating psychoanalytic and Buddhistviews of mind, Mark has continued to lead the way. His first bookhad the intriguing title Thoughts Without a Thinker, a phrasefrom the object relations theorist Donald Winnicott, which alsovoices a contemplative perspective.18 Tara’s, Mark’s, and Jack’sworks are emblematic of a wider movement, with countlesstherapists now blending various contemplative practices orperspectives with their own approach to psychotherapy.While the research establishment remains somewhat skepticalof the potency of meditation as a treatment for DSM-leveldisorders, the widening pool of psychotherapists enthusiasticabout bringing together meditation and psychotherapy continuesto grow. Although researchers await randomized studies withactive controls, psychotherapists already offer meditation-enriched treatments for their clients.For instance, as of this writing there have been 1,125 articles inthe scientific literature on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.Tellingly, more than 80 percent of these were published in thepast five years.Of course, meditation has its limits. Dan’s original interest inmeditation during his college days was because he felt anxious.Meditation seemed to calm those feelings somewhat, but they stillcame and went.Many people go to psychotherapists for just such problems.Dan did not. But years later he was diagnosed with that adrenaldisorder, the cause of his long-standing high blood pressure. Oneof those adrenal symptoms: elevated levels of cortisol, the stresshormone that triggers feelings of anxiety. Along with his years ofmeditation, a drug that adjusts that adrenal problem seemed alsoto handle the cortisol—and the anxiety.IN A NUTSHELLAlthough meditation was not originally intended to treatpsychological problems, in modern times it has shown promise inthe treatment of some, particularly depression and anxietydisorders. In a meta-analysis of forty-seven studies on theapplication of meditation methods to treat patients with mentalhealth problems, the findings show that meditation can lead todecreases in depression (particularly severe depression), anxiety,and pain—about as much as medications but with no side effects.Meditation also can, to a lesser degree, reduce the toll ofpsychological stress. Loving-kindness meditation may beparticularly helpful to patients suffering from trauma, especiallythose with PTSD.The melding of mindfulness with cognitive therapy, or MBCT,has become the most empirically well-validated psychologicaltreatment with a meditation basis. This integration continues tohave a wide impact in the clinical world, with empirical tests ofapplications to an ever larger range of psychological disordersunder way. While there are occasional reports of negative effectsof meditation, the findings to date underscore the potentialpromise of meditation-based strategies, and the enormousincrease in scientific research in these areas bodes well for thefuture.I11A Yogi’s Brainn the steep hills above the ridge-hugging Himalayan village ofMcLeod Ganj, you might stumble on a small hut or remote cavehousing a Tibetan yogi on a long-term, solo retreat. In the springof 1992, an intrepid team of scientists, Richie and Cliff Saronamong them, traveled to those huts and caves to assess the brainactivity of the yogi within each.A three-day journey had brought them to McLeod Ganj, thehill station in the foothills of the Himalayas that is home to theDalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. There thescientists set up shop in a guesthouse owned by a brother of theDalai Lama, who resides nearby. Several rooms were given over tounpacking and assembling the equipment for deployment inbackpacks for transport up to the mountain hermitages.In those days such brain measurements required a mélange ofEEG electrodes and amplifiers, computer monitors, videorecording equipment, batteries, and generators. That equipment,much larger than today’s, weighed several hundred pounds.Traveling with those instruments in their hard protective cases,the researchers resembled a nerdy rock band. There were no roadsto follow; yogis on retreat choose the most remote place they canfind. And so, with great effort, and the help of several porters, thescientists lugged their measuring instruments to the yogis.The Dalai Lama himself had identified these yogis as mastersin lojong, a systematic mind training method; in his view thesewere ideal subjects for study. The Dalai Lama had written a letterurging the yogis to cooperate, and even sent along a personalemissary, a monk from his private office, to vouch for the top-levelrequest that they participate.Arriving at a yogi’s hermitage, the scientists presented theletter and through a translator asked to monitor the yogi’s brainwhile he meditated.The same answer came from each yogi in turn: No.To be sure, they all were exceptionally friendly and warm.Some offered to teach the scientists the very practices they wantedto measure. A few said they would think about it. But none wouldgo ahead then and there.Some may have heard about another yogi who once had beenpersuaded by a similar letter from the Dalai Lama to leave hisretreat and travel to a university in faraway America todemonstrate his ability to raise his core body temperature at will.That yogi had died soon after his return, and rumors on themountainside held that the experiment had played a role.For most of these yogis, science was quite foreign; none hadmuch inkling of the role of science in modern Western culture.Moreover, of the eight yogis the team met on this expedition, onlyone had ever seen an actual computer before Richie and the teamarrived.A few of the yogis made the canny argument that they had noidea what, exactly, the strange machines measured. If themeasurements were irrelevant to what they were doing, or if theirbrain failed to meet some scientific expectation, it might look tosome as though their methods were of no use. That, they said,might discourage those on the same path.Whatever the reasons, the net result of this scientificexpedition was a resounding nothing.Despite the failure to get cooperation, let alone data, andthough futile in the short term, the exercise proved instructive,beginning a steep learning curve. For starters, better to bring themeditators to the equipment, especially in a well-fortified brainlab—if they would come.For another, research on such adepts confronts uniquechallenges beyond their rarity, their intentional remoteness, andtheir unfamiliarity with or disinterest in scientific endeavors.While their mastery at this inner expertise seems akin to world-class rankings in sports, in this “sport,” the better you get the lessyou care about your ranking—let alone social status, riches, orfame.That list of indifferences includes any personal pride youmight take in what scientific measures show about your inneraccomplishments. What mattered to them was how the resultsmight influence others for better or worse.Prospects for scientific studies were dim.A SCIENTIST AND A MONKEnter Matthieu Ricard, whose degree in molecular genetics fromFrance’s Pasteur Institute had been under the tutelage of FrançoisJacob, who later won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.1 As a postdocMatthieu abandoned his promising career in biology to become amonk; over the decades since, he has lived in retreat centers,monasteries, and hermitages.Matthieu was an old friend of ours; he had often participated(as had we) in dialogues (organized by the Mind and LifeInstitute) betweenthe Dalai Lama and various groups ofscientists, where Matthieu voiced the Buddhist viewpoint onwhatever topic was at hand.2 You might recall that during the“destructive emotions” dialogue, the Dalai Lama exhorted Richieto test meditation rigorously and extract what was of value for thebenefit of the larger world.The Dalai Lama’s call to action touched Matthieu as stronglyas it did Richie, stirring in this monk’s mind (to his surprise) along-unused expertise in the scientific method. Matthieu himselfwas the first monk to come for study at Richie’s lab, spendingseveral days as experimental subject and as collaborator onmethods to refine the protocol used with a succession of otheryogis. Matthieu Ricard was a coauthor on the main journal articlereporting initial findings with yogis.3For much of the time Matthieu had spent as a monk in Nepaland Bhutan, he was the personal attendant to Dilgo KhyentseRinpoche, one of the last century’s most universally reveredTibetan meditation masters.4 Many, many lamas of note amongthose living in exile from Tibet—including the Dalai Lama—hadsought out Dilgo Khyentse for private instruction.This put Matthieu at the heart of a large network within theTibetan meditative world. He knew whom to suggest as potentialsubjects of study—and, perhaps most important, was trusted bythose very meditation experts. Matthieu’s participation made allthe difference in recruiting those elusive adepts.Matthieu could reassure them that there was good reason totravel half the globe to the university campus in Madison,Wisconsin—a place many Tibetan lamas and yogis had neverheard of, let alone seen. Further, they would have to put up withthe weird food and habits of a foreign culture.To be sure, some of those recruited had taught in the West andwere familiar with its cultural norms. But, beyond the journey toan exotic land, there were the strange rituals of the scientists—inthe yogis’ eyes an entirely alien endeavor. For those more familiarwith Himalayan hermitages than with the modern world, nothingin their frame of reference made much sense of all this.Matthieu’s reassurance that their efforts would be worthwhilewas the key to their cooperation. For these yogis, “worthwhile” didnot mean their participation would have a personal benefit—increase their fame or feed their pride—but rather that it wouldhelp other people. As Matthieu understood, their motivation wascompassion, not self-interest.Matthieu emphasized the motivation of the scientists, whodedicated themselves to this because they believed if the scientificevidence supported the efficacy of these practices, it would helppromote the incorporation of the practices into Western culture.Matthieu’s crucial reassurances have so far brought twenty-one of these most advanced meditators to Richie’s lab for brainstudies. That number includes seven Westerners who have done atleast one three-year retreat at the center in Dordogne, France,where Matthieu has practiced, as well as fourteen Tibetan adeptswho traveled to Wisconsin from India or Nepal.FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD PERSONSMatthieu’s training in molecular biology gave him an ease with therigors and rules of science’s methods. He dove into the planningsessions to help design the methods that would be used to assaythe first guinea pig—himself. As both design collaborator andvolunteer number one, he tried out the very scientific protocol hehad helped shape.While extremely unusual in the annals of science, there areprecedents for researchers to be the first guinea pig in their ownexperiments, particularly to be assured of the safety of some newmedical treatment.5 The rationale here, though, was not fear ofexposing others to an unknown risk, but rather, a uniqueconsideration when it comes to studying how we might train themind and shape the brain.What’s being studied is intensely private, one person’s innerexperience—while the tools used to measure it are machines thatyield objective measures of biological reality, but nothing of thatinner one. Technically, the inner assessment requires a “first-person” report, while the measurements are a “third-person”report.Closing the gap between the first and third person was the ideaof Francisco Varela, the brilliant biologist and cofounder of theMind and Life Institute. In his academic writing Varela proposed amethod for combining the first- and third-person lenses with a“second person,” an expert on the topic being studied.6 And, heargued, the person being studied should have a well-trained mind,and so, yield better data than someone not so well trained.Matthieu was both topic expert and possessor of that well-trained mind. So, for example, when Richie began to study thevarious types of meditation, he did not realize that “visualization”required more than just generating a mental image. Matthieuexplained to Richie and his team that the meditator also cultivatesa particular emotional state that goes along with a given image—say, with an image of the bodhisattva Tara the accompanying statemelds compassion and loving-kindness. Advice such as this ledRichie’s group to change from being guided by the top-downnorms of brain science, to collaborating with Matthieu in thedetails of designing the experimental protocol. 7Long before Matthieu became a collaborator we had moved inthis direction by immersing ourselves in what we were studying—meditation—to generate hypotheses for empiric testing. Thesedays science knows this general approach as an instance of thegeneration of “grounded theory”—that is, grounded in a directpersonal sense of what’s going on.Varela’s approach goes a step further, necessary when what’sbeing studied lurks in the mind and brain of one person yetresembles a strange land to the one doing the research. Havingexperts like Matthieu in this private domain allowsmethodological precision where there would otherwise beguesswork.We admit to our own mistakes here. Back in the 1980s, whenRichie was a young professor at the State University of New Yorkat Purchase and Dan a journalist working in New York City, wejoined together for some research on a single, gifted meditator.This student of U Ba Khin (Goenka’s teacher) had himself becomea teacher, and claimed he could enter at will a state of nibbana—the endpoint of that Burmese meditative path. We wanted to findhard correlates of that vaunted state.Problem was, the main tool we had was an assay of bloodlevels of cortisol, a hot topic in research of the day. We used thatas our main measure because we were borrowing a lab from one ofthe main investigators of cortisol—not because there was somestrong hypothesis relating nibbana to cortisol. But taking cortisollevels demanded that the meditator—ensconced in a hospitalroom on the other side of a one-way mirror—be hooked up to anIV that let us draw his blood every hour; we traded shifts with twoother scientists so we could provide around-the-clock coverage, aroutine we followed for several days.The meditator signaled with a buzzer several times duringthose few days that he had entered nibbana. But the cortisol levelsbudged not at all—they were irrelevant. We also deployed a brainmeasure, but that, too, was not so apt, and primitive by today’sstandards. We’ve come a long way.What might be next as contemplative science continues toevolve? The Dalai Lama, a twinkle in his eye, once told Dan thatsomeday “the person being studied and the person doing theresearch will be one and the same.”Perhaps partly with that aim in mind, the Dalai Lama hasencouraged a group at Emory University to introduce a Tibetan-language science curriculum into the studies of monks inmonasteries.8 A radical move: the first such change in six hundredyears!THE JOY OF LIVINGOne cool September morning in 2002,a Tibetan monk arrived atthe Madison, Wisconsin, airport. His journey had started seventhousand miles away, at a monastery atop a hill on the fringe ofKathmandu, Nepal. The trip took eighteen hours in the air overthree days and crossed ten time zones.Richie had met the monk briefly at the 1995 Mind and Lifemeeting on destructive emotions in Dharamsala, but had forgottenwhat he looked like. Still, it was easy to pick him out from thecrowd. He was the only shaven-headed man wearing gold-and-crimson robes in the Dane County Regional Airport. His name wasMingyur Rinpoche and he had traveled all this way to have hisbrain assayed while he meditated.After a night’s rest, Richie brought Mingyur to the lab’s EEGroom, where brain waves are measured with what looks like asurrealist art piece: a shower cap extruding spaghetti-like wires.This specially designed cap holds 256 thin wires in place, eachleading to a sensor pasted to a precise location on the scalp. Atight connection between the sensor and the scalp makes all thedifference between recording usable data about the brain’selectrical activity and having the electrode simply be an antennafor noise.As Mingyur was told when a lab technician began pastingsensors to his scalp, ensuring a tight connection for each andplacing them in their exact spot takes no more than fifteenminutes. But when Mingyur, a shaven-headed monk, offered uphis bald scalp, it turned out such continually exposed skin is morethickened and callused than one protected by hair. To make thecrucial electrode-to-scalp connection tight enough to yield viablereadings through thicker skin ended up taking much longer thanusual.Most people who come into the lab get impatient, if notirritated, by such delays. But Mingyur was not in the leastperturbed, which calmed the nervous lab technician—and all thoselooking on—with the feeling that anything that happened would beokay with him. That was the first inkling of Mingyur’s ease ofbeing, a palpable sense of relaxed readiness for whatever lifemight bring. The lasting impression Mingyur conveyed was ofendless patience and a gentle quality of kindness.After spending what seemed like an eternity ensuring that thesensors had good contact with the scalp, the experiment wasfinally ready to begin. Mingyur was the first yogi studied after thatinitial session with Matthieu. The team huddled in the controlroom, eager to see if there was a “there” there.A precise analysis of something as squishy as, say, compassiondemands an exacting protocol, one that can detect that mentalstate’s specific pattern of brain activity amid the cacophony of theelectrical storm from everything else going on. The protocol hadMingyur alternate between one minute of meditation oncompassion and thirty seconds of a neutral resting period. Toensure confidence that any effect detected was reliable rather thana random finding, he would have to do this four times in rapidsuccession.From the start Richie had grave doubts about whether thiscould work. Those on the lab team who meditated, Richie amongthem, all knew it takes time just to settle the mind, oftenconsiderably longer than a few minutes. It was inconceivable, theythought, that even someone like Mingyur would be able to enterthese states instantaneously and not need some time to reachinner quiet.Despite their skepticism, in designing this protocol they hadlistened to Matthieu, who knew both the culture of science and ofthe hermitage. He had assured them that these mental gymnasticswould be no problem for someone at Mingyur’s level of expertise.But Mingyur was the first such adept to be formally tested this wayand Richie and his technicians were unsure, even nervous.Richie was fortunate that John Dunne, a Buddhist scholar atthe University of Wisconsin—who exhibits a rare combination ofscientific interests, humanities expertise, and fluency in Tibetan—volunteered to translate.9 John delivered precisely timedinstructions to Mingyur signaling him to start a compassionmeditation, and then after sixty seconds another cue for thirtyseconds of his mental resting state, and so on for three morecycles.Just as Mingyur began the meditation, there was a suddenhuge burst of electrical activity on the computer monitorsdisplaying the signals from his brain. Everyone assumed thismeant he had moved; such movement artifacts are a commonproblem in research with EEG, which registers as wave patternreadings of electrical activity at the top of the brain. Any motionthat tugs the sensors—a leg shifting, a tilt of the head—getsamplified in those readings into a huge spike that looks like abrain wave and has to be filtered out for a clean analysis.Oddly, this burst seemed to last the entire period of thecompassion meditation, and as far as anyone could see, Mingyurhad not moved an iota. What’s more, the giant spikes diminishedbut did not disappear as he went into the mental rest period, againwith no visible shift in his body.The four experimenters in the control room team watched,transfixed, while the next meditation period was announced. AsJohn Dunne translated the next instruction to meditate intoTibetan, the team studied the monitors in silence, glancing backand forth from the brain wave monitor to the video trained onMingyur.Instantly the same dramatic burst of electrical signal occurred.Again Mingyur was perfectly still, with no visible change in hisbody’s position from resting to the meditation period. Yet themonitor still displayed that same brain wave surge. As this patternrepeated each time he was instructed to generate compassion, theteam looked at one another in astonished silence, nearly jumpingoff their seats in excitement.The lab team knew at that moment they were witnessingsomething profound, something that had never before beenobserved in the laboratory. None could predict what this wouldlead to, but everyone sensed this was a critical inflection point inneuroscience history.The news of that session has created a scientific stir. As of thiswriting, the journal article reporting these findings has been citedmore than 1,100 times in the world’s scientific literature.10 Sciencehas paid attention.A MISSED BOATAbout the time news of Mingyur Rinpoche’s remarkable data wasreaching the scientific world, he was invited to the lab of a famouscognitive scientist then at Harvard University. There Mingyur wasput through two protocols: in one he was asked to generate anelaborate visual image; in the other he was assessed to see if hehad any knack for extrasensory perception. The cognitive scientisthad high hopes that he would document the achievements of anextraordinary subject.Mingyur’s translator, meanwhile, was fuming because theprotocol was not just hours long and onerous but painfullyirrelevant to Mingyur’s actual meditative expertise—from thetranslator’s perspective, an act of disrespect within Tibetan normsfor treating a teacher like Mingyur (who nevertheless retained hisusual good cheer throughout).The net result of Mingyur’s day in that lab: he flunked bothtests, doing no better than the college sophomores who were theusual subjects of study there.Mingyur, it turned out, had done no practice with visualizationsince the long-gone, early years of his practice. As time went on,his meditations evolved. His current method, ongoing openpresence (which expresses itself as kindness in everyday life),encourages letting go of any and all thoughts rather thangenerating any specific visual images. Mingyur’s practice actuallyran counter to the purposeful generation of an image and thefeelings that go along with it—perhaps reversing any skill he mightonce have had in that. His circuitry for visual memory had gottenno particular workout, despite his thousands of hours spent inotherkinds of mental training.As for “extrasensory perception,” Mingyur had never claimedto have such supernormal powers. Indeed, the texts of histradition made clear that any fascination with such abilities was adetour, a dead end on the path.That was no secret. But nobody had asked him. Mingyur hadrun smack into a paradox of today’s research on consciousness,the mind, and meditative training: those who do the research onmeditation are too often in the dark about what they are actuallystudying.Ordinarily in the cognitive neurosciences, a “subject” (the termfor someone who volunteers for the study, in the objectifying, at-a-distance language of science) goes through an experimentalprotocol designed by the researcher. The researcher concocts thatdesign without conferring with any of the subjects, partly becausesubjects are meant to be naive about the purpose (to avoid apotential biasing factor) but also because the scientists have theirown points of reference—their hypotheses, other studies done inthe field which they hope to inform, and the like. Scientists don’tconsider their subjects particularly well informed about any ofthis.That traditional scientific stance completely missed the chanceto assess Mingyur’s actual meditative talents, as did our earlierfailure to take the measure of nibbana. Both times that first- andthird-person estrangement led to misjudging where thesemeditators’ remarkable strengths lie and how to measure them,akin to testing a legendary golfer like Jack Nicklaus on his prowessat shooting basketball free throws.NEURAL PROWESSBack to Mingyur’s time in Richie’s lab. The next stunner camewhen Mingyur went through another batch of tests, this time withfMRI, which renders what amounts to a 3-D video of brainactivity. The fMRI gives science a lens that complements the EEG,which tracks the brain’s electrical activity. The EEG readings aremore precise in time, the fMRI more accurate in neural locations.An EEG does not reveal what’s happening deeper in the brain,let alone show where in the brain the changes occur—that spatialprecision comes from the fMRI, which maps the regions wherebrain activity occurs in minute detail. On the other hand, fMRI,though spatially exacting, tracks the timing of changes over one ortwo seconds, far slower than EEG.While his brain was probed by the fMRI, Mingyur followed thecue to engage compassion. Once again the minds of Richie and theothers watching in the control room felt as though they hadstopped. The reason: Mingyur’s brain’s circuitry for empathy(which typically fires a bit during this mental exercise) rose to anactivity level 700 to 800 percent greater than it had been duringthe rest period just before.Such an extreme increase befuddles science; the intensity withwhich those states were activated in Mingyur’s brain exceeds anywe have seen in studies of “normal” people. The closestresemblance is in epileptic seizures, but those episodes last briefseconds, not a full minute. And besides, brains are seized byseizures, in contrast to Mingyur’s display of intentional control ofhis brain activity.Mingyur was a meditation prodigy, as the lab team learnedwhile tallying his history of lifetime hours of the practice: at thatpoint, 62,000. Mingyur grew up in a family of meditation experts;his brother Tsoknyi Rinpoche and half brothers Chokyi NyimaRinpoche and Tsikey Chokling Rinpoche are consideredcontemplative masters in their own right.Their father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, was widely respectedamong the Tibetan community as one of the few great livingmasters in this inner art who had trained in old Tibet, but then(spurred by China’s invasion) lived outside that country. WhileMingyur has as of this writing been on retreats for a total of ten ofhis forty-two years, Tulku Urgyen reputedly had done more thantwenty years of retreat over his lifetime; Mingyur’s grandfather—Tulku Urgyen’s father—was said to have put in more than thirtyyears on retreat.11As a young boy one of Mingyur’s favorite pastimes waspretending he was a yogi meditating in a cave. He entered a three-year meditation retreat when he was just thirteen, a decade ormore earlier than most who undertake such a challenge. And bythe end of that retreat he proved so proficient that he was mademeditation master for the next three-year round, which begansoon after the first ended.THE WANDERER RETURNSIn June 2016, Mingyur Rinpoche came back to Richie’s lab. It hadbeen eight years since Mingyur had last been studied there. Wewere fascinated to see what an MRI of his brain might show.Some years before, he had announced he would be startinganother three-year retreat—his third. But to everyone’s shock,instead of going into a remote hermitage with an attendant alongto cook and care for him as is traditional, he disappeared onenight from his monastery in Bodh Gaya, India, taking only hisrobes, a bit of cash, and an ID card.During his odyssey Mingyur lived as a wandering mendicant,spending winters as a sadhu on the plains of India and during thewarmer months inhabiting Himalayan caves where fabled Tibetanmasters had stayed. Such a wandering retreat, not uncommon inold Tibet, has become rare, especially among Tibetans likeMingyur whose diaspora has brought them into the modern world.During those wandering years there was not a word from him,save once when he was recognized by a Taiwanese nun at a retreatcave. He gave her a letter (telling her to send it after he had movedon) that said not to worry, he was fine—and exhorting his studentsto practice. A photo that surfaced when a monk, a longtime friend,managed to join Mingyur shows a radiant face with a wispy beardand long hair, his expression one of ebullient rapture.Then, suddenly, in November 2015, after almost four and ahalf years as a wanderer in radio silence, Mingyur reappeared athis monastery in Bodh Gaya. On hearing that news, Richiearranged to see him during a visit to India that December.Months later, Mingyur stopped in Madison while on anAmerican teaching tour, and stayed at Richie’s house. Withinminutes of his arrival at the house Mingyur agreed to go back intothe scanner. Only a few months after returning from hishardscrabble life he seemed right at home in this up-to-the-minute lab.As Mingyur entered the MRI suite, the lab technician gave hima friendly welcome, saying, “I was the tech the last time you werein the scanner.” Mingyur beamed his electric smile in return.While he waited for the machine to be readied, Mingyur jokedwith another member of Richie’s team, an Indian scientist fromHyderabad.Given the go-ahead, Mingyur left his sandals at the bottom ofthe two-step ladder that boosted him to the MRI table and laydown so the tech could strap his head into a cradle tight enoughthat it allows no more than 2 millimeters of movement—all thebetter to obtain sharp images of his brain. His calves, thickened byyears of trekking the steep slopes of the Himalayas, protrudedfrom his monk’s robes and then disappeared as the table slippedinto the maw of the MRI.The technology had improved since his last visit; the monitorsreveal a crisper image of his brain’s folds and tucks. It would takemonths to compare these data with those collected years before,and to track the changes in his brain during that time against thenormal alterations seen in the brains of men his age.Although he was barraged with requests, following his returnfrom this last retreat, to have his brain scanned by many labs allover the world, Mingyur turned most all of them down for fear ofbecoming a perpetual subject. He had consented to have his brainrescanned by Richie and his team because he knew they hadlongitudinal data from previous scans and could analyze ways hisbrain might be showing atypical changes.The first scan Richie’slab had of Mingyur’s brain was obtainedin 2002; there was another in 2010 and now the most recent, in2016. These three scans provided the lab team with anopportunity to examine age-related declines in gray matterdensity, the site of the brain’s molecular machinery. Each of us hasa decrease in the density of gray matter as we age, and as we sawin chapter nine, “Mind, Body, and Genome,” a given brain can becompared with a large database of the brains of other people thesame age.With the development of high-resolution MRI, scientists havenow discovered that they can use anatomical landmarks toestimate the age of a person’s brain. Brains of people of a givenage group into a normal distribution, a bell-shape curve; mostpeople’s brain’s hover around their chronological age. But somepeople’s brains age more quickly than their chronological agewould predict, putting them at risk for premature age-relatedbrain disorders such as dementia. And other people’s brains agemore slowly compared with their chronological age.As of this writing the most recent set of scans of Mingyur’sbrain are still being processed, but Richie and his team see someclear patterns already, using rigorous quantitative anatomicallandmarks. Comparing Mingyur’s brain to norms for his age, hefalls in the 99th percentile—that is, if we had 100 people who arethe same chronological age as Mingyur (forty-one years at thisscan), his brain would be the youngest in a group of 100 age- andgender-matched peers. After his latest retreat as a wanderer, whenthe lab compared Mingyur’s brain changes to those of a controlgroup over the same period of time, Mingyur’s brain is clearlyaging more slowly.Although his chronological age was forty-one at the time, hisbrain fit most closely the norms for those whose chronological agewas thirty-three.This rather remarkable fact highlights the further reaches ofneuroplasticity, the very basis of an altered trait: an enduringmode of being reflecting an underlying change in the structure ofthe brain.The total hours of practice Mingyur put in during his years as awanderer are difficult to calculate. At his level of expertise,“meditation” becomes an ongoing feature of awareness—a trait—not a discrete act. In a very real sense, he practices continuously,day and night. In fact, in his lineage the distinction made is notthe conventional equation of meditation with time spent in asession sitting on a cushion versus regular life, but rather, betweenbeing in a meditative state or not, no matter what else you aredoing.From Mingyur’s very first visit to the lab, he had renderedcompelling data hinting at the power of intentional, sustainedmental exercise to redesign neural circuitry. But the findings fromMingyur were only anecdotal, a single case that might beexplained many different ways. For instance, perhaps hisremarkable family has some mysterious genetic predispositionthat both motivates them to meditate and leads them to highlevels of proficiency.More convincing are results from a larger group of seasonedmeditation adepts like Mingyur. His remarkable neuralperformance was part of a larger story, a one-of-a-kind brainresearch program that has harvested data from these world-classmeditation experts. Richie’s lab continues to study and analyze themass of data points from these yogis, in an ever-growing set offindings unparalleled in the history of contemplative traditions, letalone brain science.IN A NUTSHELLAt first Richie’s lab found it impossible to get the cooperation ofthe most highly experienced yogis. But when Matthieu Ricard, aseasoned yogi himself with a PhD in biology, assured his peerstheir participation might be of benefit to people, a total of twenty-one yogis agreed. Matthieu, in an innovative collaboration withRichie’s lab, helped design the experimental protocol. The nextyogi to come to the lab, Mingyur Rinpoche, was also the one withmost lifetime hours of practice—62,000 at the time. When hemeditated on compassion there was a huge surge in electricalactivity in his brain as recorded by EEG; fMRI images revealedthat during this meditation his circuitry for empathy jumped inactivity by 700 to 800 percent compared to its level at rest. Andwhen he later went on retreat as a wanderer for four and a halfyears, the aging of his brain slowed, so that at forty-one his brainresembled the norm for thirty-three-year-olds.W12Hidden Treasurehile Mingyur’s visit to Madison had yielded jaw-droppingresults, he was not alone. Over the years in Richie’s lab,those twenty-one yogis have come to be formally tested. They wereat the height of this inner art, having racked up lifetimemeditation hours ranging from 12,000 to Mingyur’s 62,000 (thenumber he had accomplished while going through these studies,and before his four-years-plus wandering retreat).Each of these yogis completed at least one three-year retreat,during which they meditated in formal practice a minimum ofeight hours per day for three continuous years—actually, for threeyears, three months, and three days. That equates, in aconservative estimate, to about 9,500 hours per retreat.All have undergone the same scientific protocol, those fourone-minute cycles of three kinds of meditation—which has yieldeda mountain of metrics. The lab’s team spent months and monthsanalyzing the dramatic changes they saw during those shortminutes in these highly seasoned practitioners.Like Mingyur, they entered the specified meditative states atwill, each one marked by a distinctive neural signature. As withMingyur, these adepts have shown remarkable mental dexterity,instantly and with striking ease mobilizing these states: generatingfeelings of compassion, the spacious equanimity of completeopenness to whatever occurs, or laser-sharp, unbreakable focus.They entered and left these difficult-to-achieve levels ofawareness within split seconds. These shifts in awareness wereaccompanied by equally pronounced shifts in measurable brainactivity. Such a feat of collective mental gymnastics has never beenseen by science before.A SCIENTIFIC SURPRISERecall that at the last minute the bedridden Francisco, just amonth before he died, had to cancel attending that meeting inMadison with the Dalai Lama. He sent his close student AntoineLutz, who had just received his PhD under Francisco’smentorship, to present in his absence.Richie and Antoine met for the first time just one day beforethat meeting, and from the start their two scientific minds melded.Antoine’s background in engineering and Richie’s in psychologyand neuroscience made for a complementary pairing.Antoine ended up spending the next ten years in Richie’s lab,where he brought his precision mind to the analysis of the EEGsand fMRIs of yogis. Antoine, like Francisco, has been a dedicatedmeditation practitioner himself, and the combination of hisintrospective insights with his scientific mind-set made for anextraordinary colleague in Richie’s center.Now a professor at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center inFrance, Antoine continues to pursue research in contemplativeneuroscience. He has been involved from the start in the researchwith yogis and has coauthored a stream of articles, with morecoming, reporting his findings.Preparing the raw data on the yogis for sifting by sophisticatedstatistical programs has demanded painstaking work. Just teasingout the differences between the yogis’ resting state and their brainactivity during meditation was a gargantuan computing task. So ittook Antoine and Richie quite a while to stumble upon a patternhiding in that data flood, empirical evidence that got lost amid theexcitement about the yogis’ prowess in altering their brain activityduring meditative states. In fact, the missed pattern surfaced onlyas an afterthought during aless hectic moment, months later,when the analytic team sifted through the data again.All along the statistical team had focused on temporary stateeffects by computing the difference between a yogi’s baseline brainactivity and that produced during the one-minute meditationperiods. Richie was reviewing the numbers with Antoine andwanted a routine check to ensure that the initial baseline EEGreadings—those taken at rest, before the experiment began—werethe same in a group of control volunteers who tried the identicalmeditations the yogis were doing. He asked to see just the baselinemeasures by themselves.When Richie and Antoine sat down to review what thecomputers had just crunched, they looked at the numbers andthen looked at one another. They knew exactly what they wereseeing and exchanged just one word: “Amazing!”All the yogis had elevated gamma oscillations, not just duringthe meditation practice periods for open presence and compassionbut also during the very first measurement, before any meditationwas performed. This electrifying pattern was in the EEG frequencyknown as “high-amplitude” gamma, the strongest, most intenseform. These waves lasted the full minute of the baselinemeasurement before they started the meditation.This was the very EEG wave that Mingyur had displayed inthat surprising surge during both open presence and compassion.And now Richie’s team saw that same unusual brain pattern in allthe yogis as a standard feature of their everyday neural activity. Inother words, Richie and Antoine had stumbled upon the holygrail: a neural signature showing an enduring transformation.There are four main types of EEG waves, classed by theirfrequency (technically, measured in hertz). Delta, the slowestwave, oscillates between one and four cycles per second, andoccurs mainly during deep sleep; theta, the next slowest, cansignify drowsiness; alpha occurs when we are doing little thinkingand indicates relaxation; and beta, the fastest, accompaniesthinking, alertness, or concentration.Gamma, the very fastest brain wave, occurs during momentswhen differing brain regions fire in harmony, like moments ofinsight when different elements of a mental puzzle “click”together. To get a sense of this “click,” try this: What single wordcan turn each of these into a compound word: sauce, pine, crab?*The instant your mind comes up with the answer, your brainsignal momentarily produces that distinctive gamma flare. Youalso elicit a short-lived gamma wave when, for instance, youimagine biting into a ripe, juicy peach and your brain drawstogether memories stored in different regions of the occipital,temporal, somatosensory, insular, and olfactory cortices tosuddenly mesh the sight, smells, taste, feel, and sound into asingle experience. For that quick moment the gamma waves fromeach of these cortical regions oscillate in perfect synchrony.Ordinarily gamma waves from, say, a creative insight, last nolonger than a fifth of a second—not the full minute seen in theyogis.Anyone’s EEG will show distinctive gamma waves for shortmoments from time to time. Ordinarily, during a waking state weexhibit a mixture of different brain waves that wax and wane atdifferent frequencies. These brain oscillations reflect complexmental activity, like information processing, and their variousfrequencies correspond to broadly different functions. Thelocation of these oscillations varies among brain regions; we candisplay alpha in one cortical location and gamma in another.In the yogis, gamma oscillations are a far more prominentfeature of their brain activity than in other people. Our usualgamma waves are not nearly as strong as that seen by Richie’steam in yogis like Mingyur. The contrast between the yogis andcontrols in the intensity of gamma was immense: on average theyogis had twenty-five times greater amplitude gamma oscillationsduring baseline compared with the control group.We can only make conjectures about what state ofconsciousness this reflects: yogis like Mingyur seem to experiencean ongoing state of open, rich awareness during their daily lives,not just when they meditate. The yogis themselves have describedit as a spaciousness and vastness in their experience, as if all theirsenses were wide open to the full, rich panorama of experience.Or, as a fourteenth-century Tibetan text describes it,. . . a state of bare, transparent awareness;Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootlesswisdom;Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without theslightest reference point;Spacious empty clarity, a state wide-open andunconfined; the senses unfettered . . .1The gamma brain state Richie and Antoine discovered wasmore than unusual, it was unprecedented—a wow! No brain labhad ever before seen gamma oscillations that persist for minutesrather than split seconds, are so strong, and are in synchronyacross widespread regions of the brain.Astonishingly, this sustained, brain-entraining gamma patterngoes on even while seasoned meditators are asleep—as was foundby the Davidson group in other research with long-term vipassanameditators who have an average of about 10,000 hours lifetimepractice. These gamma oscillations continuing during deep sleepare, again, something never seen before and seem to reflect aresidual quality of awareness that persists day and night.2The yogis’ pattern of gamma oscillation contrasts with how,ordinarily, these waves occur only briefly, and in an isolatedneural location. The adepts had a sharply heightened level ofgamma waves oscillating in synchrony across their brain,independent of any particular mental act. Unheard of.Richie and Antoine were seeing for the first time a neural echoof the enduring transformations that years of meditation practiceetch on the brain. Here was the treasure, hidden in the data allalong: a genuine altered trait.STATE BY TRAITIn one of the many studies Antoine spearheaded, when volunteersnew to meditation were trained for a week in the same practicesthat the yogis do, there was absolutely no difference between thevolunteers’ brains at rest and when they were trying to meditateon cue, as the yogis did.3 This contrasts with the remarkabledifference between resting and meditation in the yogis. Since anylearnable mental skill takes sustained practice over time tomaster, given the massive hours of lifetime meditation among theyogis, we are not surprised by this vast difference between novicesand masters.But there’s another surprise here: the yogis’ remarkable talentat entering a specific meditative state on cue, within a second ortwo, itself signals an altered trait. This mental feat stands in starkcontrast to most of us meditators who, relative to the yogis, aremore like beginners: when we meditate, it takes us a while to settleour minds, let go of distracting thoughts that overwhelm ourfocus, and get some momentum in our meditation.From time to time we may have what we consider a “good”meditative experience. And now and then we might peek at ourwatch to see how much longer the session should last.Not for the yogis.Their remarkable meditation skills bespeak what’s technicallyknown as a “state by trait interaction,” suggesting the brainchanges that underlie the trait also give rise to special abilities thatactivate during meditative states—here, a heightened speed ofonset, greater intensity, and extended duration.In contemplative science, an “altered state” refers to changesthat occur only during meditation. An altered trait indicates thatthe practice of meditation transformed the brain and biology sothat meditation-induced changes are seen before beginning tomeditate.So a “state-by-trait” effect refers to temporary state changesthat are seen only in those who display enduring altered traits—the long-termmeditators and the yogis. Several have shown upduring the research in Richie’s lab.One example. Recall that the yogis show a pronouncedelevation in gamma activity during the open presence andcompassion meditations, far greater than in the controls. Thiselevation in gamma activity was a change from baseline, theireveryday levels—marking another state-by-trait effect.What’s more, while they rest in “open presence,” the verydistinction between a state and a trait blurs: in their tradition, theyogis are explicitly instructed to mingle the state of open presencewith their everyday life—to morph the state into a trait.READY FOR ACTIONOne by one they lay in the scanners, their heads held firmly inplace by cumbersome earphones. There was one group ofmeditation novices, and another of Tibetan and Western yogis(lifetime average 34,000 hours); each one had his or her (yes,there were female yogis) brain scanned while doing a compassionpractice.4The specific method they deployed was described by MatthieuRicard, who collaborated on the study, as follows. First bring tomind someone you care about deeply and relish the feeling ofcompassion toward that person—and then hold that same loving-kindness toward all beings, without thinking of anyone inparticular.5During the session of loving-kindness each person heard atrandom a series of sounds, some happy, like a baby laughing;others neutral, like background sounds in a café, or still others,sounds of human suffering (like screams, as in the studies inchapter six). Just as in previous studies of empathy and the brain,for everyone the neural circuitry for tuning in to distress activatedmore strongly during compassion meditation than when thosevocal signals of suffering came while the person was at rest.Significantly, this brain response for sharing another person’sfeelings was greater in the yogis compared to beginners. Inaddition, their expertise in compassion practice also upped actionin circuitry typically involved while we sense another person’smental state or take their perspective. Finally, there was a boost inbrain areas, especially the amygdala, key for what’s salient; we feelanother person’s distress is of compelling importance and paymore attention.Tellingly, the yogis but not the beginners showed the final partof the brain’s arc to action, a jump in activity in the motor centersthat guide the body when we are ready to move—to take somedecisive action to help, even though the subjects were lying still ina scanner. The yogis showed a huge boost in these circuits. Theinvolvement of neural regions for action, particularly the premotorcortex, seems striking: to emotional resonance with a person’ssuffering it adds the readiness to help.The yogi’s neural profile during compassion seems to reflectan endpoint of the path of change. For people who have nevermeditated before, absolute beginners, the pattern does not showup during their meditation on compassion—it takes a bit ofpractice. There’s a dose response here: this pattern shows up a bitin beginners, more in people who have put in more lifetime hoursof meditation, and to the greatest extent in the yogis.Intriguingly, yogis hearing sounds of people in distress whilethey were doing loving-kindness meditation showed less activitythan others do in their postcingulate cortex (PCC), a key area forself-focused thought.6 In the yogis, hearing sounds of sufferingseems to prime a focus on others.They also show a stronger connection between the PCC andthe prefrontal cortex, an overall pattern suggesting a “down-regulation” of the “what will happen to me?” self-concern that candampen compassionate action.7Some of the yogis later explained that their training imbuedthem with preparedness for action, so the moment they encountersuffering they are predisposed to act without hesitation to help theperson. This preparedness, along with their willingness to engagewith someone’s suffering, counters the normal tendency towithdraw, to back away from a person in distress.That seems to embody the advice of Tibetan meditation master(and Matthieu’s main teacher) Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche to yogissuch as these: “Develop a complete acceptance and openness to allsituations and emotions, and to all people, experiencingeverything totally without mental reservations andblockages. . . .”8PRESENCE TO PAINAn eighteenth-century Tibetan text urges meditators to practice“on whatever harms come your way,” adding, “When sick, practiceon that sickness. . . . When cold, practice on that coldness. Bypracticing in this way all situations will arise as meditation.”9Mingyur Rinpoche, likewise, encourages making all sensation,even pain, our “friend,” using it as a basis for meditation. Since theessence of meditation is awareness, any sensation that anchorsattention can be used as support—and pain particularly can bevery effective in focusing. Treating it as a friend “softens andwarms” our relationship, as he puts it, as we gradually learn toaccept the pain rather than try to get rid of it.With that advice in mind, consider what happened whenRichie’s group used the thermal stimulator to create intense painin the yogis. Each yogi (including Mingyur) was compared to ameditation-naive volunteer matched for age and gender. For aweek before they came to be studied, these volunteers learned togenerate an “open presence,” an attentional stance of lettingwhatever life presents us come and go, without adding thoughts oremotional reactions. Our senses are fully open, and we just stayaware of what happens without getting carried away by any downsor ups.All those in the study were first tested to find their individualmaximal heat point. Then they were told they would get a ten-second blast of that fiery device, which would be preceded by aslight warming of the plate—a ten-second warning. Meanwhile,their brain was being scanned.The moment the plate heated a bit—the cue for pain about tocome—the control groups activated regions throughout the brain’spain matrix as though they were already feeling the intense burn.The reaction to the “as if” pain—technically, “anticipatoryanxiety”—was so strong that when the actual burning sensationbegan, their pain matrix activation became just a bit stronger. Andin the ten-second recovery period, right after the heat subsided,that matrix stayed nearly as active—there was no immediaterecovery.This sequence of anticipation-reactivity-recovery gives us awindow on emotion regulation. For instance, intense worry aboutsomething like an upcoming painful medical procedure can initself cause us anticipatory suffering, just imagining how bad wewill feel. And after the real event we can continue to be upset bywhat we have gone through. In this sense our pain response canstart well before and last long after the actual painful moment—exactly the pattern shown by those volunteers in the comparisongroup.The yogis, on the other hand, had a very different response inthis sequence. They, like the controls, were also in a state of openpresence—no doubt one some magnitudes greater than for thenovices. For the yogis, their pain matrix showed little change inactivity when the plate warmed a bit, even though this cue meantextreme pain was ten seconds away. Their brains seemed tosimply register that cue with no particular reaction.But during the actual moments of intense heat the yogis had asurprising heightened response, mainly in the sensory areas thatreceive the granular feel of a stimulus—the tingling, pressure, highheat, and other raw sensations on the skin of the wrist where thehot plate rested. The emotional regions of the pain matrixactivated a bit, but not as much as the sensory circuitry.This suggests a lessening of the psychological component—likethe worry we feel in anticipationone of his favorites, he credits Khunu as his mentor on thetopic.Before meeting Khunu Lama, Dan had spent months with anIndian yogi, Neem Karoli Baba, who had drawn him to India inthe first place. Neem Karoli, known by the honorific Maharaji, wasnewly famous in the West as the guru of Ram Dass, who in thoseyears toured the country with mesmerizing accounts of histransformation from Richard Alpert (the Harvard professor firedfor experimenting with psychedelics, along with his colleagueTimothy Leary) to a devotee of this old yogi. By accident, duringChristmas break from his Harvard classes in 1968, Dan met RamDass, who had just returned from being with Neem Karoli inIndia, and that encounter eventually propelled Dan’s journey toIndia.Dan managed to get a Harvard Predoctoral TravelingFellowship to India in fall 1970, and located Neem Karoli Baba at asmall ashram in the Himalayan foothills. Living the life of a sadhu,Maharaji’s only worldly possessions seemed to be the white cottondhoti he wore on hot days and the heavy woolen plaid blanket hewrapped around himself on cold ones. He kept no particularschedule, had no organization, nor offered any fixed program ofyogic poses or meditations. Like most sadhus, he was itinerant,unpredictably on the move. He mainly hung out on a tucket on theporch of whatever ashram, temple, or home he was visiting at thetime.Maharaji seemed always to be absorbed in some state ofongoing quiet rapture, and, paradoxically, at the same time wasattentive to whoever was with him.1 What struck Dan was howutterly at peace and how kind Maharaji was. Like Khunu, he tookan equal interest in everyone who came—and his visitors rangedfrom the highest-ranking government officials to beggars.There was something about his ineffable state of mind thatDan had never sensed in anyone before meeting Maharaji. Nomatter what he was doing, he seemed to remain effortlessly in ablissful, loving space, perpetually at ease. Whatever state Maharajiwas in seemed not some temporary oasis in the mind, but a lastingway of being: a trait of utter wellness.BEYOND THE PARADIGMAfter two months or so making daily visits to Maharaji at theashram, Dan and his friend Jeff (now widely known as thedevotional singer Krishna Das) went traveling with anotherWesterner who was desperate to renew his visa after spendingseven years in India living as a sadhu. That journey ended for Danat Bodh Gaya, where he was soon to meet Khunu Lama.Bodh Gaya, in the North Indian state Bihar, is a pilgrimage sitefor Buddhists the world over, and most every Buddhist countryhas a building in the town where its pilgrims can stay. TheBurmese vihara, or pilgrim’s rest house, had been built before thetakeover by a military dictatorship that forbade Burma’s citizensto travel. The vihara had lots of rooms but few pilgrims—and soonbecame an overnight stop for the ragged band of roamingWesterners who wandered through town.When Dan arrived there in November 1970, he met the solelong-term American resident, Joseph Goldstein, a former PeaceCorps worker in Thailand. Joseph had spent more than four yearsstudying at the vihara with Anagarika Munindra, a meditationmaster. Munindra, of slight build and always clad in white,belonged to the Barua caste in Bengal, whose members had beenBuddhist since the time of Gautama himself.2Munindra had studied vipassana (the Theravadan meditationand root source of many now-popular forms of mindfulness)under Burmese masters of great repute. Munindra, who becameDan’s first instructor in the method, had just invited his friend S.N. Goenka, a jovial, paunchy former businessman recently turnedmeditation teacher, to come to the vihara to lead a series of ten-day retreats.Goenka had become a meditation teacher in a traditionestablished by Ledi Sayadaw, a Burmese monk who, as part of acultural renaissance in the early twentieth century meant tocounter British colonial influence, revolutionized meditation bymaking it widely available to laypeople. While meditation in thatculture had for centuries been the exclusive provenance of monksand nuns, Goenka learned vipassana from U Ba Khin (U is anhonorific in Burmese), at one time Burma’s accountant general,who had been taught the method by a farmer, who was in turntaught by Ledi Sayadaw.Dan took five of Goenka’s ten-day courses in a row, immersinghimself in this rich meditation method. He was joined by about ahundred fellow travelers. This gathering in the winter of 1970–71was a seminal moment in the transfer of mindfulness from anesoteric practice in Asian countries to its current widespreadadoption around the world. A handful of the students there, withJoseph Goldstein leading the way, later became instrumental inbringing mindfulness to the West.3Starting in his college years Dan had developed a twice-dailyhabit of twenty-minute meditation sessions, but this immersion inten days of continual practice brought him to new levels. Goenka’smethod started with simply noting the sensations of breathing inand out—not for just twenty minutes but for hours and hours aday. This cultivation of concentration then morphed into asystematic whole-body scan of whatever sensations wereoccurring anywhere in the body. What had been “my body, myknee” becomes a sea of shifting sensation—a radical shift inawareness.Such transformative moments mark the boundary ofmindfulness, where we observe the ordinary ebb and flow of themind, with a further reach where we gain insight into the mind’snature. With mindfulness you would just note the stream ofsensations.The next step, insight, brings the added realization of how weclaim those sensations as “mine.” Insight into pain, for example,reveals how we attach a sense of “I” so it becomes “my pain” ratherthan being just a cacophony of sensations that changecontinuously from moment to moment.This inner journey was explained in meticulous detail inmimeographed booklets of practice advice—well worn in themanner of hand-to-hand underground publications—written byMahasi Sayadaw, Munindra’s Burmese meditation teacher. Theragged pamphlets gave detailed instruction in mindfulness andstages far beyond, to further reaches of the path.These were practical handbooks for transforming the mindwith recipes for mental “hacking” that had been in continuous usefor millennia.4 When used along with one-on-one oral teachingstailored to the student, these detailed manuals could guide ameditator to mastery.The manuals shared the premise that filling one’s life withmeditation and related practices produces remarkabletransformations of being. And the overlap in qualities betweenKhunu, Maharaji, and a handful of other such beings Dan met inhis travels around India seemed to affirm just such possibilities.Spiritual literature throughout Eurasia converges indescriptions of an internal liberation from everyday worry,fixation, self-focus, ambivalence, and impulsiveness—one thatmanifests as freedom from concerns with the self, equanimity nomatter the difficulty, a keenly alert “nowness,” and loving concernfor all.In contrast, modern psychology, just about a century old, wasclueless about this range of human potential. Clinical psychology,Dan’s field, was fixated on looking for a specific problem like highanxiety and trying to fix that one thing. Asian psychologies had awider lens on our lives and offered ways to enhance our positiveside. Dan resolved that on his return to Harvard from India, hewould make his colleagues aware of what seemed an innerupgrade far more pervasive than any dreamed of in ourpsychology.5Just before coming to India, Dan had written an article—basedon his own first flings with meditation during college and on thescant sources on the topic then available in English—thatproposed the existenceof pain—along withintensification of the pain sensations themselves. Right after theheat stopped, all the regions of the pain matrix rapidly returneddown to their levels before the pain cue, far more quickly than wasthe case for the controls. For these highly advanced meditators,the recovery from pain was almost as though nothing much hadhappened at all.This inverted V-shaped pattern, with little reaction duringanticipation of a painful event, followed by a surge of intensity atthe actual moment, then swift recovery from it, can be highlyadaptive. This lets us be fully responsive to a challenge as ithappens, without letting our emotional reactions interfere beforeor afterward, when they are no longer useful. This seems anoptimal pattern of emotion regulation.Remember the fear we felt when we were six years old aboutgoing to the dentist to get a cavity filled? This could meannightmares at that age. But we change as we grow older. When weare twenty-six, what might have loomed as a trauma in childhoodbecomes ho-hum, an appointment to schedule in the midst of abusy day. We are a very different person as an adult than we wereas a child—we bring more mature ways of thinking and reacting tothe moment.Likewise, with the yogis in the pain study, their many years ofmeditation practice suggests the state they were in during the painreflects enduring changes acquired through their training. Andbecause they were engaged in the open presence practice, this, too,qualifies as a state by trait effect.EFFORTLESSAs with any skill we sharpen, within the first weeks of meditationpractice, beginners notice increased ease. For instance, whenvolunteers new to meditation practiced daily for ten weeks, theyreported the practice progressively got easier and more enjoyable,whether they were focusing on their breath, generating loving-kindness, or just observing the flow of their thoughts.10And as we saw in chapter eight, Judson Brewer found a groupof long-term meditators (with an average lifetime practice of about10,000 hours) reported effortless awareness during meditation inassociation with decreased activity in the PCC, that part of thedefault network active during “selfing” mental operations.11 Whenwe take the self out of the picture, it seems, things go along withlittle effort.When long-term meditators reported “undistractedawareness,” “effortless doing,” “not efforting,” and “contentment,”activation in the PCC went down. On the other hand, when theyreported “distracted awareness,” “efforting,” and“discontentment,” activation of the PCC went up.12A group of first-time meditators also reported an increase inease, though only while they were actively being mindful—a stateeffect that did not persist otherwise. For the beginners, “increasedease” appears very relative: going from exerting great effort—particularly to counter the mind’s tendency to wander—andgetting a bit better at it as the days and weeks go on. But theeasing of their effort goes nowhere near the effortlessness found inthe yogis, as we’ve seen in their remarkable performance in theon/off lab protocol.One metric for effortlessness here comes down to being able tokeep your mind on a chosen point of focus and resist the naturaltendency to wander off into some train of thought or be pulledaway by a sound, while having no feeling of making an effort. Thiskind of ease seems to increase with practice.Richie’s lab group initially compared expert meditators tocontrols in the magnitude of prefrontal activation during focusedattention on a small light. The long-term meditators showed amodest increase in prefrontal activation compared with thecontrols, though the difference was, strangely, not veryimpressive.One afternoon as Richie and his lab team sat around a longconference table pondering these somewhat disappointing data,they began to reflect on the large span of expertise even within theso-called expert meditator group. This expert group actuallyranged in practice hours from 10,000 to 50,000—a very largespread. Richie wondered what they would find if they comparedthose with the most versus least amount of practice. He hadalready found that with higher levels of expertise, there’s aneffortlessness that actually would be reflected in less rather thanmore prefrontal activation.When the team compared those with the most versus thosewith the least amount of practice, they found something trulystriking: all of the increase in prefrontal activation was accountedfor by those with the least amount of practice. For those with themost lifetime hours of practice, there was very little prefrontalactivation.Curiously, the activation tended to occur only at the verybeginning of a practice period, while the mind was focusing on theobject of concentration, that little light. Once the light was infocus, the prefrontal activation dropped away. This sequence mayrepresent the neural echoes of effortless concentration.Another measure of concentration was to see how distractedthe meditators are by emotional sounds—laughing, screaming,crying—which they heard in the background while focusing on thelight. The more amygdala activation in response to those sounds,the more wavering in concentration. Among meditators with thegreatest amount of lifetime practice hours—an average of 44,000lifetime hours (the equivalent of twelve hours a day for ten years)the amygdala hardly responded to the emotional sounds. But forthose with less practice, (though still a high number—19,000hours) the amygdala also showed a robust response. There was astaggering 400 percent difference in the size of the amygdalaresponse between these groups!This indicates an extraordinary selectivity of attention: a braineffortlessly able to block out the extraneous sounds and theemotional reactivity they normally elicit.What’s more, this means traits continue to alter even at thehighest level of practice. The dose-response relationship does notseem to end even up to 50,000 hours of practice.The finding of a switch to effortlessness in brain functionamong the most highly experienced yogis was only possiblebecause Richie’s group had assessed total lifetime hours ofmeditation practice. Lacking that simple metric, this valuablefinding would have been buried in the general comparisonbetween novices and experts.THE HEART-MINDBack in 1992, Richie and that gallant band of researchers broughttheir tons of equipment to India, hoping to measure the mostseasoned meditation masters near where the Dalai Lama lives.Next to his residence sits the Namgyal Monastery Institute ofBuddhist Studies, an important training ground for monk-scholars in the Dalai Lama’s tradition. Richie and his researcherfriends, you’ll remember, were unable to collect any real scientificdata from the mountain-dwelling yogis.But when the Dalai Lama asked Richie and his colleagues togive a talk on their work to the monks in the monastery, Richiethought maybe the equipment they schlepped to India could beput to some good use. Rather than just a dry academic talk, theywould give a live demonstration of how brain electrical signals canbe recorded.And so, two hundred monks were dutifully sitting on cushionson the floor when Richie and friends arrived with their suitcasesfilled with EEG equipment. To place a headful of electrodes takesquite a bit of time. Richie and the other scientists worked asquickly as possible to secure all the electrodes in place.The demo that evening used as subject the neuroscientistFrancisco Varela. As Richie placed the electrodes on Francisco’sscalp, the view of Francisco was blocked. But when Richiecompleted his task and moved out of way, a loud chorus oflaughter erupted from the usually very staid monks.Richie thought the monks were laughing because Franciscolookedof such a lasting ultra-benign mode ofconsciousness.6 The major states of consciousness, from theperspective of the science of the day, were waking, sleeping, anddreaming—all of which had distinctive brain wave signatures.Another kind of consciousness—more controversial and lackingany strong support in scientific evidence—was the total absorptionin undistracted concentration, samadhi in Sanskrit, an alteredstate reached through meditation.There was but one somewhat questionable scientific case studyrelating to samadhi that Dan could cite at the time: a report of aresearcher touching a heated test tube to a yogi in samadhi, whoseEEG supposedly revealed that he remained oblivious to the pain.7But there was not a shred of data that spoke to any longer-lasting, benign quality of being. And so all Dan could do washypothesize. Yet here in India, Dan met beings who just mightembody that rarefied consciousness. Or so it seemed.Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism—all the religions that sproutedwithin Indian civilization—share the concept of “liberation” in oneform or other. Yet psychology knows that our assumptions biaswhat we see. Indian culture held a strong archetype of the“liberated” person, and that lens, Dan knew, might readily fosterwishful projections, a false image of perfection in the service of apervasive and powerful belief system.So the question remained about these rarefied qualities ofbeing: fact or fairy tale?THE MAKING OF A REBELJust as most every home in India has an altar, so do their vehicles.If it’s one of the ubiquitous huge, lumbering Tata trucks, and thedriver happens to be Sikh, the pictures will feature Guru Nanak,the revered founder of that religion. If a Hindu driver, there willbe a deity, perhaps Hanuman, Shiva, or Durga, and usually afavorite saint or guru. That portraiture makes the driver’s seat amobile puja table, the sacred place in an Indian home where dailyprayer occurs.The fire-engine-red VW van that Dan drove around Cambridgeafter returning to Harvard from India in the fall of 1972 featuredits own pantheon. Among the images Scotch-taped to thedashboard were Neem Karoli Baba, as well as other saints he hadheard about: an otherworldly image of Nityananda, a radiantlysmiling Ramana Maharshi, and the mustached, mildly amusedvisage of Meher Baba with his slogan—later popularized by singerBobby McFerrin—“Don’t worry. Be happy.”Dan had parked the van not far from the evening meeting of acourse on psychophysiology he was taking to acquire the lab skillshe would need for his doctoral dissertation, a study of meditationas an intervention in the body’s reactions to stress. There were justa handful of students seated around a seminar table in that roomon the fourteenth floor of William James Hall. Richie happened tochoose the chair next to Dan, and our first meeting was that night.Talking after class, we discovered a common goal: we wantedto use our dissertation research as an opportunity to documentsome of the benefits that meditation brings. We were taking thatpsychophysiology seminar to learn the methods we would need.Dan offered a ride back to the apartment Richie shared withSusan (Richie’s sweetheart since college, and now his wife).Richie’s reaction to the VW’s dashboard puja was wide-eyedastonishment. But he was delighted to be riding with Dan: even asan undergraduate, Richie read broadly in psychology journals,including the obscure Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,where he had come upon Dan’s article.As Richie recalls, “It blew my mind that someone at Harvardwas writing an article like that.” When he was applying to gradschool, he had taken this as one of several signs that he shouldchoose Harvard. Dan, for his part, was pleased that someone hadtaken the article seriously.Richie’s interests in consciousness had been first aroused bythe works of authors such as Aldous Huxley, British psychiatrist R.D. Laing, Martin Buber, and, later, Ram Dass, whose Be HereNow was published just at the start of his graduate studies.But these interests had been driven underground during hiscollege years in the psychology department at New YorkUniversity’s uptown campus in the Bronx, where staunchbehaviorists, followers of B. F. Skinner, dominated the psychologydepartment.8 Their firm assumption was that only observablebehavior was the proper study of psychology—looking inside themind was a questionable endeavor, a taboo waste of time. Ourmental life, they held, was completely irrelevant to understandingbehavior.9When Richie signed up for a course in abnormal psychology,the textbook was ardently behaviorist, claiming that allpsychopathology was the result of operant conditioning, where adesired behavior earns a reward, like a tasty pellet for a pigeonwhen it pecks the right button. That view, Richie felt, wasbankrupt: it not only ignored the mind, it also ignored the brain.Richie, who could not stomach this dogma, dropped the courseafter the first week.Richie’s steely conviction was that psychology should study themind—not reinforcement schedules for pigeons—and so hebecame a rebel. Richie’s interests in what went on in the mindwere, from the strict behaviorist perspective, transgressive.10While by day he fought the behaviorist tide, his nights were hisown to explore other interests. He volunteered to help with sleepresearch at Maimonides Medical Center, where he learned how tomonitor brain activity with EEGs, an expertise that would servehim well throughout the rest of his career in the field.His senior honors thesis adviser was Judith Rodin, with whomRichie conducted research on daydreaming and obesity. Hishypothesis was that because daydreams take us out of the present,we become less sensitive to the body’s cues of satiety, and socontinue eating instead of stopping. The obesity part was becauseof Rodin’s interest in the topic; daydreaming was Richie’s way ofbeginning to study consciousness.11 For Richie the study was anexcuse to learn techniques to probe what was actually going oninside the mind, using physiological and behavioral measures.Richie monitored people’s heart rate and sweating while theylet their mind wander or did mental tasks. This was his first use ofphysiological measures to infer mental processes, a radicalmethod at the time.12This methodological sleight of hand, tacking an element ofconsciousness studies on to an otherwise respectable, mainstreamresearch study, was to be a hallmark of Richie’s research for thenext decade or so, when his interest in meditation found little tono support in the ethos of the time.Designing a dissertation that didn’t depend on the meditationpiece in itself but could be a stand-alone study on just thenonmeditators turned out to be a smart move for Richie. Hesecured his first academic position at the Purchase campus of theState University of New York, where he kept his interest inmeditation to himself while doing seminal work in the emergingfield of affective neuroscience—how emotions operate in the brain.Dan, however, could find no teaching post at any universitythat reflected his own interests in consciousness, and gladlyaccepted a job in journalism—a career path that eventually led tohis becoming a science writer at the New York Times. While therehe harvested Richie’s research on emotions and the brain (amongother scientists’ work) in writing Emotional Intelligence.13Of the more than eight hundred articles Dan wrote at theTimes, just a meager handful had anything to do with meditation—even as we both continued to attend meditation retreats on ourown time. We shelved the notion publicly for a decade or two,while privately pursuing the evidence that intense and prolongedmeditation can alter the core of a person’s very being. We wereboth flying under the radar.ALTEREDSTATESWilliam James Hall looms over Cambridge as an architecturalmistake, a fifteen-story modernist white slab glaringly out of placeamid the surrounding Victorian homes and the low-lying brick-and-stone buildings of the Harvard campus. At the beginning ofthe twentieth century, William James became Harvard’s firstprofessor of psychology, a field he had a major hand in inventingas he transitioned from the theoretical universe of philosophy to amore empirical and pragmatic view of the mind. James’s formerhome still stands in the adjacent neighborhood.Despite this history, as graduate students in the departmenthoused in William James Hall, we were never assigned a singlepage of James to read—he had long before fallen out of fashion.Still, James became an inspiration to us, largely because heengaged the very topic that our professors ignored and thatfascinated us: consciousness.Back in James’s day, toward the end of the nineteenth andstart of the twentieth centuries, there was a fad among Boston’scognoscenti to imbibe nitrous oxide (or “laughing gas,” as thecompound came to be called when dentists routinely deployed it).James’s transcendent moments with the help of nitrous oxide ledhim to what he called an “unshakable conviction” that “our normalwaking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness,whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, therelie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”14After pointing out the existence of altered states ofconsciousness (though not by that name), James adds, “We maygo through life without suspecting their existence; but apply therequisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all theircompleteness.”Dan’s article had begun with this very passage from WilliamJames’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, a call to studyaltered states of consciousness. These states, as James saw, arediscontinuous with ordinary consciousness. And, he observed, “Noaccount of the universe in its totality can be final which leavesthese other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” The veryexistence of these states “means they forbid a premature closing ofour accounts with reality.”Psychology’s topography of the mind foreclosed such accounts.Transcendental experiences were not to be found anywhere in thatterrain; if mentioned at all, they were relegated to the lessdesirable realms. From the early days of psychology, beginningwith Freud himself, altered states were dismissed as symptoms ofone or another form of psychopathology. For instance, whenFrench poet and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland became a discipleof the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna around the beginning of thetwentieth century, he wrote to Freud describing the mystical statehe experienced—and Freud diagnosed it as regression to infancy.15By the 1960s, psychologists routinely dismissed drug-triggeredaltered states as artificially induced psychosis (the original termfor psychedelics was “psychotomimetic” drugs—psychosismimics). As we found, similar attitudes applied to meditation—this suspicious new route to altering the mind—at least among ourfaculty advisers.Still, in 1972 the Cambridge zeitgeist included a ferventinterest in consciousness as Richie entered Harvard and Danreturned from his sojourn in Asia (the first of two) to begin hisdoctoral dissertation. Charles Tart’s bestseller of the day, AlteredStates of Consciousness, collected articles on biofeedback, drugs,self-hypnosis, yoga, meditation, and other such avenues toJames’s “other states,” capturing the ethos of the day.16 In brainscience, excitement revolved around the recent discovery ofneurotransmitters, the chemicals that send messages betweenneurons, like the mood regulator serotonin—magic molecules thatcould pitch us into ecstasy or despair.17The lab work on neurotransmitters filtered into the generalculture as a scientific pretext for attaining altered states throughdrugs like LSD. These were the days of the psychedelic revolution,which had had its roots in the very department at Harvard wewere in, which perhaps helps explain why the remaining stalwartstook a dim view of any interest in the mind that smacked ofaltered states.AN INNER JOURNEYDalhousie nestles in the lower reaches of the Dhauladhar range, abranch of the Himalayas that stretches into India’s Punjab andHimachal Pradesh states. Established in the mid-nineteenthcentury as a “hill station” where the bureaucrats of the British Rajcould escape the summer heat of the Indo-Gangetic Plain,Dalhousie was chosen for its gorgeous setting. With itspicturesque bungalows left over from colonial days, this hillstation has long been a tourist attraction.But it wasn’t the setting that brought Richie and Susan toDalhousie that summer of 1973. They had come for a ten-dayretreat—their first deep dive—with S. N. Goenka, the same teacherDan had done successive retreats with in Bodh Gaya a few yearsbefore while on his first sojourn in India for his predoctoraltraveling fellowship. Richie and Susan had just visited Dan inKandy, Sri Lanka, where he was living on a postdoctoralfellowship during this second trip to Asia.18Dan encouraged the couple to take a course with Goenka as adoorway into intensive meditation. The course was a bitdisorienting from the start. For one, Richie slept in a large tent forthe men, Susan in one for the women. And the imposition of“noble silence” from day one meant that Richie never really knewwho else shared that tent—his vague impression was that theywere mostly Europeans.In the meditation hall Richie found the floor scattered withround zafus, Zen-style cushions, to sit on. The zafu would beRichie’s perch through the twelve or so hours of sitting inmeditation the daily schedule called for.Settling onto his zafu in his usual half lotus, Richie noticed atwinge of pain in his right knee, which had always been the weakone. As the hours of sitting progressed day by day, that twingemorphed into a low howl of discomfort, and spread not just to theother knee but to his lower back as well—common hurt zones forWestern bodies unaccustomed to sitting still for hours supportedby nothing but a pillow on the floor.Richie’s mental task for the whole day was to tune in to thesensations of breathing at his nostrils. The most vivid senseimpression wasn’t his breath—it was the continual intensephysical pain in his knees and back. By the end of the first day, hewas thinking, I can’t believe I have nine more days of this.But on the third day came a major shift with Goenka’sinstruction to “sweep” with a careful, observing attention head totoe, toe to head, through all the many and varied sensations in hisbody. Though Richie found his focus returning again and again tothe throbbing pain in that knee, he also started to glimpse a senseof equanimity and well-being.Soon Richie found himself entering a state of total absorptionthat, toward the end of the retreat, allowed him to sit for up tofour hours at a go. At lights-out time he’d go to the emptymeditation hall and meditate on his body’s sensations steadily,sometimes until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.The retreat was a high for Richie. He came away with a deepconviction that there were methods that could transform ourminds to produce a profound well-being. We did not have to becontrolled by the mind, with its random associations, sudden fearsand angers, and all the rest—we could take back the helm.For days after the retreat ended, Richie still felt he was on ahigh. Richie’s mind kept soaring while he and Susan stayed on inDalhousie. The high rode with him on the bus down themountains via roads wending through fields and villages withmud-walled, thatch-roofed houses, on to the busier cities of theplains, and finally through the throbbing, packed roads ofDelhi.There Richie felt that high begin to wane as he and Susanspent a few days in the bare-bones guesthouse they could affordon their grad student budget, venturing out to Delhi’scacophonous and crowded streets to have a tailor make someclothes and buy souvenirs.Perhaps the biggest force in the decline of that meditationstate was the traveler’s stomach they both had come down with.That malady plagued them through a change of planes inFrankfurt on the cheap flight from Delhi to Kennedy Airport. Aftera full day spent in travel they landed in New York, where they weregreeted by both sets of parents, eager to see them after thissummer away in Asia.As Susan and Richie exited Customs—sick, tired, and dressedin the Indian style of the day—their families greeted them withlooks of horrified shock. Instead of enveloping them in love, theyyelled in alarm, “What have you done to yourselves? You lookterrible!”By the time they all arrived at the upstate New York countryhouse of Susan’s family, the half-life of that high had reached thebottom of its slope, and Richie felt as terrible as he’d lookedwalking off the plane.Richie tried to revive the state he had reached at the Dalhousiecourse, but it had vanished. It reminded him of a psychedelic tripin that way: he had vivid memories of the retreat, but they werenot embodied, not a lasting transformation. They were justmemories.That sobering experience fed into what was to become aburning scientific question: How long do state effects—likeRichie’s meditative highs—last? At what point can they beconsidered enduring traits? What allows such a transformation ofbeing to become embodied in a lasting way instead of fading intothe mists of memory?And just where in the mind’s terrain had Richie been?A MEDITATOR’S GUIDEBOOKThe bearings for Richie’s inner whereabouts were more than likelyto be detailed somewhere in a thick volume that Munindra hadencouraged Dan to study during his first sojourn in India a fewyears before: the Visuddhimagga. This fifth-century text, whichmeans Path to Purification in Pali (the language of Buddhism’searliest canon), was the ancient source for those mimeographedmanuals Dan had pored over in Bodh Gaya.Though centuries old, the Visuddhimagga remained thedefinitive guidebook for meditators in places like Burma andThailand, that follow the Theravada tradition, and throughmodern interpretations still offers the fundamental template forinsight meditation, the root of what’s popularly known as“mindfulness.”This meditator’s manual on how to traverse the mind’s mostsubtle regions offered a careful phenomenology of meditativestates and their progression all the way to nirvana (nibbana, inPali). The highways to the jackpot of utter peace, the manualrevealed, were a keenly concentrated mind on the one hand,merging with a sharply mindful awareness on the other.The experiential landmarks along the way to meditativeattainments were spelled out matter-of-factly. For instance, thepath of concentration begins with a mere focus on the breath (orany of more than forty other suggested points of focus, such as apatch of color—anything to focus the mind). For beginners thismeans a wobbly dance between full focus and a wandering mind.At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, whichsometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out ofcontrol. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to bedue to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asiancultures dub “monkey mind,” for its wildly frenetic randomness.As our concentration strengthens, wandering thoughts subsiderather than pulling us down some back alley of the mind. Thestream of thought flows more slowly, like a river—and finally restsin the stillness of a lake, as an ancient metaphor for settling themind in meditation practice tells us.Sustained focus, the manual notes, brings the first major signof progress, “access concentration,” where attention stays fixed onthe chosen target without wandering off. With this level ofconcentration come feelings of delight and calm, and, sometimes,sensory phenomena like flashes of light or a sense of bodilylightness.“Access” implies being on the brink of total concentration, thefull absorption called jhana (akin to samadhi in Sanskrit), whereany and all distracting thoughts totally cease. In jhana the mindfills with strong rapture, bliss, and an unbroken one-pointed focuson the meditation target.The Visuddhimagga lists seven more levels of jhana, withprogress marked by successively subtle feelings of bliss andrapture, and stronger equanimity, along with an increasingly firmand effortless focus. In the last four levels, even bliss, a relativelygross sensation, falls away, leaving only unshakable focus andequanimity. The highest reach of this ever more refined awarenesshas such subtlety it is called the jhana of “neither perception nornonperception.”In the time of Gautama Buddha, full concentrated absorptionin samadhi was heralded as the highway to liberation for yogis.Legend has it that the Buddha practiced this approach with agroup of wandering ascetics, but he abandoned that avenue anddiscovered an innovative variety of meditation: looking deeplyinto the mechanics of consciousness itself.Jhana alone, the Buddha is said to have declared, was not thepath to a liberated mind. Though strong concentration can be anenormous aid along the way, the Buddha’s path veers into adifferent kind of inner focus: the path of insight.Here, awareness stays open to whatever arises in the mindrather than to one thing only—to the exclusion of all else—as intotal concentration. The ability to maintain this mindfulness, analert but nonreactive stance in attention, varies with our powers ofone-pointedness.With mindfulness, the meditator simply notes withoutreactivity whatever comes into mind, such as thoughts or sensoryimpressions like sounds—and lets them go. The operative wordhere is go. If we think much of anything about what just arose, orlet it trigger any reactivity at all, we have lost our mindful stance—unless that reaction or thought in turn becomes the object ofmindfulness.The Visuddhimagga describes the way in which carefullysustained mindfulness—“the clear and single-minded awarenessof what actually happens” in our experience during successivemoments—refines into a more nuanced insight practice that canlead us through a succession of stages toward that final epiphany,nirvana/nibbana.19This shift to insight meditation occurs in the relationship ofour awareness to our thoughts. Ordinarily our thoughts compelus: our loathing or self-loathing generates one set of feelings andactions; our romantic fantasies quite another. But with strongmindfulness we can experience a deep sense in which self-loathingand romantic thoughts are the same: like all other thoughts, theseare passing moments of mind. We don’t have to be chased throughthe day by our thoughts—they are a continuous series of shortfeatures, previews, and outtakes in a theater of the mind.Once we glimpse our mind as a set of processes, rather thangetting swept away by the seductions of our thoughts, we enter thepath of insight. There we progress through shifting again andagain our relationship to that inner show—each time yielding yetmore insights into the nature of consciousness itself.Just as mud settling in a pond lets us see into the water, so thesubsiding of our stream of thought lets us observe our mentalmachinery with greater clarity. Along the way, for instance, themeditator sees a bewilderingly rapid parade of moments ofperception that race through the mind, ordinarily hidden fromawareness somewhere behind a scrim.Richie’s meditation high most certainly could be spottedsomewhere in these benchmarks of progress.But that high haddisappeared into the mists of memory. Sic transeunt alteredstates.In India they tell of a yogi who spent years and years alone in acave, achieving rarefied states of samadhi. One day, satisfied thathe had reached the end of his inner journey, the yogi came downfrom his mountain perch into a village.That day the bazaar was crowded. As he made his way throughthe crowd, the yogi was caught up in a rush to make way for a locallord riding through on an elephant. A young boy standing in frontof the yogi stepped back suddenly in fright—stomping right on theyogi’s bare foot.The yogi, angered and in pain, raised his walking staff to strikethe youngster. But suddenly seeing what he was about to do—andthe anger that propelled his arm—the yogi turned around andwent right back up to his cave for more practice.The tale speaks to the difference between meditation highsand enduring change. Beyond transitory states like samadhi (ortheir equivalent, the absorptive jhanas), there can be lastingchanges in our very being. The Vissudhimagga holds thistransformation to be the true fruit of reaching the highest levels ofthe path of insight. For example, as the text says, strong negativefeelings like greed and selfishness, anger and ill will, fade away. Intheir place comes the predominance of positive qualities likeequanimity, kindness, compassion, and joy.That list resonates with similar claims from other meditativetraditions. Whether these traits are due to some specifictransformative experiences that accrue in attaining those levels, orfrom the sheer hours of practice along the way, we can’t say. ButRichie’s delicious meditation-induced high—possibly somewherein the vicinity of access concentration, if not first jhana—was notsufficient to bring on these trait changes.The Buddha’s discovery—reaching enlightenment via the pathof insight—was a challenge to the yogic traditions of his day, whichfollowed the path of concentration to various levels of samadhi,the bliss-filled state of utter absorption. In those days, insightversus concentration was a burning issue in a politics ofconsciousness that revolved around the best path to those alteredtraits.Fast-forward to another politics of consciousness in the 1960s,during the heady days of the psychedelic fad. The suddenrevelations of drug-induced altered states led to assumptions like,as one acidhead put it, “With LSD we experienced what it tookTibetan monks 20 years to obtain, yet we got there in 20minutes.”20Dead wrong. The trouble with drug-induced states is that afterthe chemical clears your body, you remain the same person asalways. And, as Richie discovered, the same fading away happenswith highs in meditation.D3The After Is the Before forthe Next Duringan’s second stay in Asia was in 1973, this time on a SocialScience Research Council postdoc, ostensibly a venture in“ethnopsychology,” to study Asian systems for analyzing the mindand its possibilities. It started with six months in Kandy, a town inthe hills of Sri Lanka where Dan consulted every few days withNyanaponika Thera, a German-born Theravadan monk whosescholarship centered on the theory and practice of meditation.(Dan then continued on for several months in Dharamsala, India,where he studied at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.)Nyanaponika’s writings focused on the Abhidhamma, a modelof mind that laid out a map and methods for the transformation ofconsciousness in the direction of altered traits. While theVisuddhimagga and the meditation manuals Dan had read wereoperator’s instructions for the mind, the Abhidhamma was aguiding theory for such manuals. This psychological system camewith a detailed explanation of the mind’s key elements and how totraverse this inner landscape to make lasting changes in our corebeing.Certain sections were compelling in their relevance topsychology, particularly the dynamic outlined between “healthy”and “unhealthy” states of mind.1 All too often our mental statesfluctuate in a range that highlights desires, self-centeredness,sluggishness, agitation, and the like. These are among theunhealthy states on this map of mind.Healthy states, in contrast, include even-mindedness,composure, ongoing mindfulness, and realistic confidence.Intriguingly, a subset of healthy states applies to both mind andbody: buoyancy, flexibility, adaptability, and pliancy.The healthy states inhibit the unhealthy ones, and vice versa.The mark of progress along this path is whether our reactions indaily life signal a shift toward healthy states. The goal is toestablish the healthy states as predominant, lasting traits.While immersed in deep concentration, a meditator’sunhealthy states are suppressed—but, as with that yogi in thebazaar, can emerge as strong as ever when the concentrative statesubsides. In contrast, according to this ancient Buddhistpsychology, attaining deepening levels of insight practice leads toa radical transformation, ultimately freeing the meditator’s mindof the unhealthy mix. A highly advanced practitioner effortlesslystabilizes on the healthy side, embodying confidence, buoyancy,and the like.Dan saw this Asian psychology as a working model of themind, time-tested over the course of centuries, a theory of howmental training could lead to highly positive altered traits. Thattheory had guided meditation practice for more than twomillennia—it was an electrifying proof of concept.In the summer of 1973, Richie and Susan came to Kandy for asix-week visit before heading to India for that thrilling andsobering retreat with Goenka. Once together in Kandy, Richie andDan trekked through the jungle to consult with Nyanaponika athis remote hermitage about this model of mental well-being.2Later that year, after Dan returned from this second sojourn inAsia as a Social Science Research Fellow, he was hired at Harvardas a visiting lecturer. In the fall semester of 1974 he offered acourse, The Psychology of Consciousness, which fit well the ethosof those days—at least among students, many of whom were doingtheir own extracurricular research with psychedelics, yoga, andeven a bit of meditation.Once the psychology of consciousness course was announced,hundreds of Harvard undergrads gravitated to this survey ofmeditation and its altered states, the Buddhist psychologicalsystem, and what little was then known about the dynamics ofattention—all among the topics covered. The enrollment was solarge that the class was moved into the largest classroom venue atHarvard, the 1,000-seat Sanders Theatre.3 Richie, then in his thirdyear of graduate school, was a teaching assistant in the course.4Most of the topics in The Psychology of Consciousness—andthe course title itself—were far outside the conventional map ofpsychology in those days. No surprise, Dan was not asked to stayon by the department after that semester finished. But by then wehad done some writing and research together, and Richie wasexcited by the realization that this was what his own research pathwould be and was eager to get going.Starting while we were in Sri Lanka and continuing duringDan’s semester teaching that course on the psychology ofconsciousness, we worked on the first draft of our article, makingthe case to our colleagues in psychology for altered traits. WhileDan had, of necessity, based his first article on thin claims, scantresearch, and much guesswork, now we had a template for thepath to altered traits, an algorithm for inner transformation. Wewrestled with how to connect this map with the sparse datascience had by then yielded.Back in Cambridge we mulled all this over in longconversations, often in Harvard Square. As vegetarians at thetime, we settled on caramel sundaes at Bailey’s ice cream parlor onBrattle Street. There we